upsman Posted June 25, 2008 Share Posted June 25, 2008 looking for a video camera to tape some of my daughters sports. what is the latest and greatest camera out there? im pretty green on the video camera thing so be gentle. thanks Link to comment
RonStewart Posted June 25, 2008 Share Posted June 25, 2008 You have a lot of decisions to make: HD or standard definition Record to a DVD, hard drive, digital tape or removable memory chip. There are no decent Blu-Ray recording camcorders yet. For a shoot-video once-in-a-while and watch-it-with-the-least-possible-effort guy, I'd say go for standard def, DVD burning camera. Me, I want a Canon HV30, but that really isn't a casual shooter's camera. And it is $800 if you get a good price. Your best site for research is www.camcorderinfo.com . Ron Link to comment
smiller Posted June 25, 2008 Share Posted June 25, 2008 I would say that unless you are on a tight budget HD is pretty much mandatory. It won't be long until just about everything is in HD and after that point SD video is going to look pretty bad by comparison. Your daughter is only going to be young once, can't re-shoot it later... There are several HD offerings now and beyond that it would be impossible to cover all of the possible features and considerations in a paragraph or two. Camcorderinfo.com is a good site, I would start there. Link to comment
RonStewart Posted June 25, 2008 Share Posted June 25, 2008 The problem with the current crop of HD cameras is that you can't record to a cheap medium. Next year, there will probably be decent Blu-ray cameras. Unless our original poster wants to fool with cables, computers and editing software, the hard-drive models are out. I guess SD cards are getting reasonably inexpensive, and make transfer to a computer pretty easy. Then you can use software to burn a standard-def DVD, while keeping the original HD file for later use. Blu-ray burners for computers are now under $300. By the way, for taping soccer, you will want a decent video tripod (as distinct from a still photo tripod). I have no experience, but hear that the Velbon DV-7000 and the Velbon Videomate 607 give good results for reasonable dough. Even if you buy a cheap camcorder now, get a decent tripod. Link to comment
stubble! Posted June 25, 2008 Share Posted June 25, 2008 Do the drive-based HD cameras suffer from the same quality compromises that you see in the SD cameras? That was why I went with a DV-based camera (panasonic 3ccd SD) when I last bought. Link to comment
smiller Posted June 25, 2008 Share Posted June 25, 2008 Do the drive-based HD cameras suffer from the same quality compromises that you see in the SD cameras? That was why I went with a DV-based camera (panasonic 3ccd SD) when I last bought. No, the hard drive-based models have much more storage capacity so they don't need the extreme compression levels required when using memory cards, and quality is usually very good. DV is best, but that format seems to be disappearing from the consumer market. Link to comment
Gregori Posted June 25, 2008 Share Posted June 25, 2008 A specific camera recommendation is hard - what you might like in a camera is far to subjective to give you a real recommendation. You can't go wrong with a mid level (or better) Sony or Canon. (I have one of each - as well as a Digital-8 Sony.) There are little pocket sized cameras which have a high convenience factor, and there are 3CCD cameras which are NOT so small, but shoot stunning video under almost any lighting condition. As others have opined - I too am partial to DV (Mini DV in mine) for the simple reason that archiving footage is cheap and reliable. You can quickly and easily pull what you want off the DV tape onto the computer, edit to your heart's content, record to DVD for watching/sharing, and then store your edited video BACK to DV, all without any (real) generational losses. Cameras that record to hard drive or memory card DO compress the video to some extent, but that is (arguably) the most convenient way to hold/transfer video. (At the expense of having to store the recorded video on digital media - ie hard drives.) Hard drive storage IS getting pretty cheap - we're soon going to be talking about hard drives in Petabytes instead of Terabytes or Gigabytes. But for now (and the near future) hard drive space (enough to store video) is moderately expensive. And hard drives are NOT 100% reliable. (DAMHIK.) A typical guideline is to allow 14 Gigabytes of disk space for each hour of Standard Definition MiniDV tape (at 25Mbps) and I think the figure I read was 18GB per hour for HD. (I don't have HD cameras, so I could be wrong.) For a rough idea of cost - you can buy a 1TB (1000 GB) external drive for $200, so the cost per hour of video to store it: about $3. A mini-DV tape stores an hour of video, and I buy them for under $2 apiece. They take little to no room to store, and will last indefinitely, if not abused. I have some hi-8 tapes recorded over 20 years ago (pre-digital) that I recently digitized and moved to MiniDV, and even after 20 yrs (of non-ideal storage and transport) they looked as good as when I shot them. The only reason I wanted to change media was to ensure that I'd be able to access the content in the future. When it comes time to shop, check out www.dealcam.com - they track pricing at various vendors, and they TRY to weed out the bad apples. (Scammers, bad customer service, etc.) Google shopping will find the best price, but you're kind of on your own to be on the guard for devious or fraudulent sellers. Link to comment
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