Well naturally the HDD camcorders may look worse because unlike miniDV which stores RAW data on your computer, the HDD camcorders figure out a way to compress that data which in return you will see a loss in quality, sometimes it's significant, other times you can hardly tell. I suggest returning it and fetching up a miniDV because no matter how good a standard definition HDD camcorder will look, it will never match up to uncompressed footage.

__________________
Imagination and discipline are like yin and yang; both are completely different and yet without each other they are nothing.