Fob,
I have a Panasonic Mini DV camera, and use the IEEE1394 FireWire connection to my PC. No sound card required, no video grabber required, just a FireWire port. These are about £80 for a PC card. This allows fully digital transfer from Cam to PC and back again, so the edit is all digital with no loss, unlike with conventional capture cards. A fast HDD is required, the modern large ATA-33 IDE drives are more than adequate. The bigger capacity of the drive, the faster they work. Look for a minimum of 20GB.
To get DV in onto the cam, I had to plug in a serial cable from the still transfer kit that came with my cam and run a program that switched DV-in on. Mine does stills, but only at PAL TV resolution (720 pixels x 625 lines?). There is a Sony cam that has a megapixel CCD that allows for higher resolution captures (1024 or 1280 I think).
Not sure what FL310 is on about regarding different tapes recording additional timebase information. The information on DV is all encoded into a single stream, so if it works on one tape, it should work on them all.
My cam is a couple of years old now, and was £1200 when I got it. It's an NV-EX1.
Aq