HD handycam Vs SD Cam

HD is the future and it is here to stay. There are many reasons for using HD camcorders instead of SD camcorders, but the basics are the frame rates, low light capabilities, the higher sound quality, better larger picture, and lastly, the price for a good HD camcorder nowadays.

The frame rates are a big deal in the area of fast motion sports and action movies. These are what many prosumers would use a good camera for, usually something like recording their sons/teams sports games for review in the future (Especially football teams), short indie movies and documentaries (lots of times involving animals that run vary fast for Discovery Channel type videos), or even extra cameras to get better takes on action movies. The frame rate of a HD 30p camera is faster than 24p, meaning more footage will be taken, making the action look a lot more smooth and making something like slow motion look a lot more fluid and realistic.
Also, most HD camcorders have better low light capabilities. Most HD camcorders have what is called 3CCD's (I won't get too far into the technical aspect), and these cause the camera to generate more footage using less light. This way, you don't get the poppy, noisy (slang term for the random white lights you see in the dark), and wrongly colored video that you would receive from an SD camera.
The heightened sound quality also makes recording on an HD camera more sufficient. Most prosumer cameras with XLR in's that are SD will record 12-bit 44.1 KHZ, that is slightly below CD quality sound. Therefore, most studios would by external recorders and have to edit in the sound in the post production. If you record in HD, however, you get 16-bit 44.1 KHZ MPEG-II sound, which is cd-quality. Therefore, unless you are a super-high end broadcast station and you feel some random need for more sound quality (a bit of sound quality that the average ear cannot tell a difference whether it's there or not), you are set for recording your sound direct to tape and sounding professional.
The main thing that people notice about HD cameras is the better picture quality, but what actually attributes to that? The amount of pixels a normal SD prosumer camera like the Canon XL-2 has is .5 megapixels, compared to the HD cameras that have on the low end 2 megapixels. That's 4 times the amount of image data! Also, the picture that is captured is much bigger, therefore when you are to watch it on a screen, it is usually shrunken to fit the screen unlike in SD where it is stretched