firewire

[ilitherian]

I once had an old tv capture card, but the quality and FPS sucked, so i gave it up
I recently bought a SB Audigy, and that included a firewire port. If i get a cammera with firewire, and import it to my computer, will the quality be good? my hard drives are all 7200RPM on ATA-100, my processor is athalon XP 1600, with 512DDR ram. Does the firewire transfer the signal digitally, so no data is lost, or what?

[Mac Sidewinder]

If the camera is digital and has a firewire port (most cameras call this a DV port) then you can transfer the video in digital format with no loss. Just make sure you have a large, fast hard drive to save it to. I normally make 1 hour videos that take up 13.5gb when I transfer them.

Mac

[theReal]

The HD doesn't need to be fast, just large (any HD can write 3.6MB per second, even an old WD UDMA33 6GB with a lame 12MB/s transfer rate - I tried it several times!)

And yes, the quality is superior to everything. It's even better than DVD because it doesn't compress that much (60 minutes equals 13GB).
If you want to use the camcorder mainly for making computer-movies like Divx, get a camcorder that can do progressive scan (non-interlaced) recording. There are not many of those, but you don't need one if you mainly want to watch your videos on TV.