Slashdot Mirror
Reviews for Digital Camcorders?
bluprint asks: "I've been looking for information regarding digital camcorders. Googling for 'digital camcorder reviews' (and other variations) of course brings up tons of results, but I thought I would get input from the slashdot crowd. Does Slashdot have any suggestions on these camcorders considering price, features and quality? I plan to use it for my summer vacation, but also intend to keep it for many years (possibly even after I have kids, in a couple years), so I'm willing to spend a little more for something high quality, which uses media that will be around for a while. I'm not interested in fancy/artistic things like video editing on my computer, I just want high quality video, preferably keeping it under $1000. Are there suggestions on where to read some thorough, quality reviews of different products, and maybe even educate myself about what to look for in a digital camcorder?"
i've found dvspot.com to be a wonderful resource
price, features and quality? I plan to use it for my summer vacation
You need the most powerful zoom you can find. The bigger the zoom, the further away you can be from the nudist beach.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Get one with a low LUX number. The lower the number, the better it will record in low light situations like indoors.
A lot of camcorders ***cough***Sony***cough*** advertise having things like "Night Vision", but have a really crappy LUX rating, which makes them useless unless you are outdoors in the bright sun or in total darkness.
I'm a big fan of the canon line. The quality is great, the image stabilization is amazing, and the form factors are way more usable than the other major brands. I always felt like I was going to accidentally flip switches and press buttons with everyone else's cameras. Anyways, my humble opinion. It's a place to start looking.
Best camera for the price. Flourite lense. Small form factor, better quality picture and sond than anything for less than a Canon XL-1.
It has FireWire out as well as super video. The picture quality is breathtaking and Canon has better red tones than anybody. Enough features to do about what ever you want. Absolutely intuitive user interface, great battery life.
It Rocks.
"I want to spend less than one thousand dollars on a camera that will have great video quality, last me >10 years, and I don't want or need to edit on a computer."
If you don't want or need to edit on a computer THEN WHY GET A DIGITAL CAMERA? Digital cameras are used SO YOU CAN EDIT IT ON A COMPUTER, without any hacks or having to go through a VCR and then to a TV-in port on your computer. I edited a movie with iMovie today and it was fine, I was glad to be able to do that instead of dubbing a VHS and hoping that it would work out ultimately, however bad it looked. Digital video looks good, and will look good, and if you compress it with a good codec (mpeg-2, divx;-)) it will still look good compressed.
Perhaps the biggest reason people go digital is the ease of transfer to a computer, and perhaps the low cost of media. If you are really into high-quality analog video (film) seems to be still hanging around after all of these years, and there is no doubting the quality of the result, as well as the archive capabilities.
However, you did ask for digital, so here is the answer. I'd probably go with the miniDV format. With this, you have tons of options. I've seen miniDV cameras on ebay for less than $100 (albeit first-gen low-qual, no frills models). The real high-quality route seems to be going with the likes of the Canon XL-1 (and related models). I've seen some great quality results coming from these cameras, and I spotted one in use during the filming of The Italian Job (check out the dvd special features to see it used), presumably for proof shots, dailies, etc.
Not sure if that helps you, and even the miniDV format may be obsolete in another couple of years.
Good Luck!