I was just musing about video on digital cameras vs camcorders. The newer cameras out have 640x480 @ 30fps, which is TV if not DVD quality, if I'm not mistaken.

So why wouldn't one ditch camcorders for digital cameras and have the best of both worlds?

Reasons I can think of:
- Image stabilisation - camcorders have image stabilisation to avoid jerky movies (I wonder whether digicams do this)
- Optical zoom - most camcorders have 10x optical zoom or more as standard
- No zooming while recording - most digicams can't zoom while recording
- Sound quality - perhaps camcorders have got better sound quality?
- All those special effects, wipes and stuff (although they can be added in later)
- Manufacturers that have both product lines don't want to shoot themselves in the foot


Any other reasons people can think of?

I think it would be great if digital cameras could have movie modes that would do away with camcorders. Still photography would still be my primary mode of operation -- but sometimes you may want to capture a birthday party or concert and not have another piece of gear to worry about. Your thoughts?

My A2 has image stabilization and you can zoom while filming (manual zoom ring).

The quality is acceptable - I never use it though. My son made a couple of films with it and edited them on the PC - the film quality was OK.

I think if you do a lot of video filming, a dedicated camcorder still has the edge on quality - and definately in storage space.

Thanks for the tip.

Regarding storage space -- the digital camcorders these days use MPEG4 recording format and sd cards for storage - no more minidv tapes. On high quality, I believe a 1G card lasts about an hour. So that would be somewhat equivalent?

shuttertalk Wrote:Regarding storage space -- the digital camcorders these days use MPEG4 recording format and sd cards for storage - no more minidv tapes. On high quality, I believe a 1G card lasts about an hour. So that would be somewhat equivalent?

I stand corrected. Don't use video much so clearly haven't kept up...