Alright, i am trying to figure out why i should buy a digitial camcorder as opposed to a digital camera with video capability? i have looked around and found that digital camcorders do have the picture ability, just not as nice as the camera. then the digital camera has video capability that (as far as i can find) is the same resolution as the camcorder. So, why would i want to buy a camcorder? is it a video storage issue? i don't take clips over a few minutes usually because of the size (maybe i need to get a dvd burner - i may be living in the dark ages here) and we generally don't see a need to video looooong portions of action. i just cracked my 4M pixel lcd screen and that puts me in the market for a new camera. i just want to know what the best combo is. thx
Its a good question. I guess in the past we bought dedicated devices rather than say a stills camera trying to act as a camcorder, but as equipment improves its probably possible to buy an all in one device. One problem with recording vid on a stills camera is that it will quickly use up the memory and would be of no use until you downloaded its content - a problem say on holiday.
If you think that you will get the same video quality out of a camera compared with a decent camcorder you are mistaken. But I can't judge what quality level is good enough for you, so you may be happy with the video from a stills camera.
help me out here ... if the resolution on the dig camera is the same as the resolution on the dig camcorder, how is the quality better? if the ccd ratios are the same they should be equal, right? i know that some camcorder have stability control, but other than that why should i buy one? or am i looking at this from the wrong angle - should i be considering a camcorder that can take pics? but from what i have read, camcorder pics are of a lower quality.
Quality is dependent on much more than just the pixel count. Very important for camcorders is the speed of the CCD, because it has to be able to process 25 or 30 frames per second (and because most camcorders record interlaced, that's 50 or 60 fields per second). A minDV camcorder records in 720x576 pixels Furthermore the electonics that is behind it has to process these incoming images, compress them and store them in a video stream and it has to do that all in real time. And don't forget sound processing. There is currently no stills camera that can match up with a decent camcorder (certainly not a miniDV model) which is designed specially for video. On the other hand, no camcorder takes quality pictures as a good stills camera does, although the difference is not as big as some years ago. If you want good quality for both, you will have to buy two pieces of equipment. If you buy one piece for both purposes you are compromising quality on one of them.
