I bought my first tapeless camera last week... HD 3 chip with SD card slot.

Nice video. After shooting, I always record my videos from source to DVD anyway. That gives me the raw archive. A spindle of 100 DVDs is a lot lighter to carry than a case of 100 miniDV tapes.

Set top DVD recorders, starting at $100, record a VIDEO_TS folder. There's a couple of OSX applications that convert VIDEO_TS video files to .mov (and many other formats), for editing purposes.

Some newest set top DVD recorders have SD card slot.

An 8GB SD card is $50. Holds 1 hr of video, as does a $5 miniDV tape. So 10 tapes later, you've paid for the card. My camera's CF card has served me for 5 years. That camera's predecessor's memory stick for 8 years, so I have faith in memory cards.

My camera also comes with a built in MiniDVD recorder, but I haven't tried that yet to see if it creates a VIDEO_TS folder, or something proprietary. The cute Asian saleskid said the miniDVD holds 20 mins, which is not practical in the studio or field.

SONY set top DVD recorders, in the $150 range, finalize the DVD with a protection feature, so that in OSX only ROOT can open it and work with the VIDEO_TS folder. Not sure if the same situation with SONY Vaio computers (SONY to SONY), or other PCs does the same..

Panasonic and other brands set top DVD recorders don't finalize with the ROOT protection nuisance. Unfortunately, Fry's was out of the Panasonic model.