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DV camera recommendation for a school?
Hi everyone! First post! 
Can anyone suggest a model of NTSC video camera for the school I work for? There are only three criteria... one, it must not require drivers be installed (we have hundreds of computers and these cameras might be hooked up to any of them or loaned and hooked up to home computers, etc) two, it must work on Macs and PCs (a given, if it doesn't require device specific drivers?) and three, please under $400. Panasonic or Canon are preferred because we have batts and chargers for them, but that's not essential. In the past we've gone for MiniDV cameras with firewire. These worked fine (as long as the computer had firewire) but it seems like these cameras are falling out of favour. So before I recommend buying another four of the suckers, I want to check: USB cameras still all require drivers? Are there non Mini-DV cameras that use firewire? Aside from DV streams, what codec is easiest to work with in an editor and also doesn't require a camera-specific codec to be installed first? (and preferably not require us to buy an MPEG-2 license for each computer.) Any other considerations for a camera that will be used on arbitrary computers? Editing will be done in Final Cut, iMovie and.... oh yeah MovieMaker... It might sound like I'm asking a lot, but I just want to know if any of these modern HDD/SD/DVD/whatever cameras can compare to DV/firewire in terms of being plug and play? Finally, we're probably going to look for an HD camera which would have to fill similar criteria. Any suggestions? Thank you for any insight!
Can anyone suggest a model of NTSC video camera for the school I work for? There are only three criteria... one, it must not require drivers be installed (we have hundreds of computers and these cameras might be hooked up to any of them or loaned and hooked up to home computers, etc) two, it must work on Macs and PCs (a given, if it doesn't require device specific drivers?) and three, please under $400. Panasonic or Canon are preferred because we have batts and chargers for them, but that's not essential. In the past we've gone for MiniDV cameras with firewire. These worked fine (as long as the computer had firewire) but it seems like these cameras are falling out of favour. So before I recommend buying another four of the suckers, I want to check: USB cameras still all require drivers? Are there non Mini-DV cameras that use firewire? Aside from DV streams, what codec is easiest to work with in an editor and also doesn't require a camera-specific codec to be installed first? (and preferably not require us to buy an MPEG-2 license for each computer.) Any other considerations for a camera that will be used on arbitrary computers? Editing will be done in Final Cut, iMovie and.... oh yeah MovieMaker... It might sound like I'm asking a lot, but I just want to know if any of these modern HDD/SD/DVD/whatever cameras can compare to DV/firewire in terms of being plug and play? Finally, we're probably going to look for an HD camera which would have to fill similar criteria. Any suggestions? Thank you for any insight!