Simply put, the Mini DVD camcorder takes the same information from the chip and squashes it into a smaller space, using MPEG-2 compression. You will not have the same detail and color depth, (intensity and hue) that you will have with the same information recorded in MiniDV. I would rather have the highest quality video available to work with and then compress it to whatever playback format you need. The video quality of the best digital still camerra is still not up to MiniDV standards. It compresses the image even more than MiniDVD and also is known to drop frames. Stick with the separate cameras for now.