Video Camera - SWMBO Birthday

Pete7

Pete7

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Folks, SWMBOs birthday is due shortly and todays hint was a video camera to record the dogs, us sailing and kids etc. Needs to be simple point and shoot type as she isn't particularly PC literate but can just manage to use photobucket to post on forums etc, now want to use "You Tube" etc. Not sure of what sort of budget I need but say £150 - 200. Advice appreciated, but she has seen the Flip one and quite fancies it.

Pete
 
For about £200 you can get a reasonable Hard Drive camera. 30 to 40Gb HDD and 30 - 60x zoom.

Can recommend both JVC and Sony. Advantage with Sony is that you can get a waterproof/dive housing a whole lot cheaper than JVC if that is of interest.

Suggest you pay a visit to your local electrical shop (Curries/Dixons etc) and see what is on offer. Once you know what you want, go look on the internet for a deal.

Again, I would strongly recommend a HDD camera. No media to worry about and they record into MPG or such like so pulling off to PC/Youtube is a 30second task.

Cheers

Wayne
 
Panasonic HDC SD100 review

Records to SD card not disks, hard drive or tapes, very robust and power friendly.

Use a laptop with a caddy/portable hard drive to transfer contents of sd cards to disk while afloat.

The biggest disadvantage of HD cameras is that editing video is difficult and time consuming, software is not widely available yet and the PC platforms just haven't got the grunt. My quad processor box with 4 gig of ram and 2Tb of hard drive can't keep up!!!!!!

If you don't want the hassle of processing HD then fall back to one of the many SD card recording standard definition cameras.
 
It doesn't? /forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif

Sorry in that last sentence I meant 'fall back to one of the many Standard Definition SD Card recording cameras'

Recording to Secure Digital card makes the camera smaller and lighter, much more robust and much less power hungry.
 
Ha, understand. There is a bit of dual use of HD and SD going on here.

SD (Card) small data storage card available in 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16Gb
SD (Standard Definition).

HD (Hard Drive) Camera stores recordings onto a Hard Drive rather than SD card or tape
HD (High Definition) 720/1080 line recording.

My personal preferences are

SD Card / Hard Drive

I much prefer Hard Drive recording. As mentioned though, a Hard Drive camera is heavier and more power hungry but it's ease of use, for me, outweighs those downsides. Do not be bluffed by the lower cost of and SD Card camera. 2 x 16Gb SD cards will add more to the cost of the camera than the increased cost of a Hard Drive camera.

High Def / Standard Def

I believe that for "Average Joe" who only does point-and-shoot type stuff, High Def is an overkill. Give it a few years and the cost of these cameras will come down and then it would be worth while. For now, the cost outweighs the benefit (In my belief)

Now I must own up. I have never used a High Def camera or one that records to SD Cards, so I may be way off the mark. I have had a couple of JVC Everio (Both now owned by thieving, lowlife scumbags) and now a Sony and I have to say that the Sony has some nice features that the JVC did not, but it is not the base model so not sure if this applies.
Please do not be conned by salesman who try to sell it in the amount of Digital zoom. it is meaningless. Quality of lens and Optical Zoom are what should be looked at. My Sony has 40x Carl Zeiss lens which is, in my opinion, far superior to the 60x that was on the JVC.

As I mentioned in my original post, go and have a play in a shop and then do some internet research into reviews and deals available before making you purchase. (Just last week while I was wasting time in Dixons at Heathrow there was a woman giving her husband a tongue lashing for spending £90 more on his camera just because he wanted it a few days before they flew.)

Good luck

Wayne
 
mmmmm AWOL. I trust this is for when you are playing back all your sailing video and has nothing to do with Recording mode. /forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif
 
My nice old Sony MiniDV camera was showing signs of old age, so I upgraded this Christmas ready for the Grandchildrens visit.

I tried various cheap and cheerful cameras and all were rubbish.

First was a Praktica camera recording to SD cards. Good make, excellent price (£150), cant go wrong? Went back to the shop within 48 hours. Jittery, blurry pictures, badly out of focus most of the time, autofocus (when it did work) took up to 5 seconds to keep up with the zoom. Colour quality poor.

Next was Samsung SD card camera £160 from Currys. Claimed to be ideal for You Tube. Well it probably is if you look at the quality (?!) of the average YouTube video. Better pictures, but autofocus still sluggish particularly on zoom, but overall quality pretty poor still. Tried to upload the result to the PC for editing up. PC would not recognise it except through the provided software. Snag: provided software needed a 3ghz dual core processor to run it. My PC is 'only' 2ghz and the software would hang and crash after a few minutes.

Many Googles later I finally discovered the camera uses one of the latest HD codex's, so new that it is generally unavailable, and in any case needs minimum 3ghz dual core.... etc. Very few of the available editing suites have that particular codex, and those that do need minimum 3.....etc. So that went back too.

Twist SWMBO's arm (expensive) and go for something more expensive. A Sony HDD camera with 'only' 30gb hard drive. All the excellent Sony facilities, opticals and technology of the original camera, about half the size and weight, first class picture quality, works fine with the 2ghz PC (No sir you will not get any modern camera to work on a PC that slow, I had been told elsewhere). 'Only30gb' still gives seven times more recording space than the MiniDV and at better quality and resolution. I really can not see that I will take seven hours video non stop, but then I can add a 'memory stick' (not cheap. and not a cheap one from EBAy which are fakes) and get another 4 hours. Battery supplied is only an hours life anyway, now upped to a 3 hour battery.

HDD for me every time. Forget the cheap You tube stuff - its a waste of money.
 
Folks thanks, some more googling required here I think. Like the idea of the Flip though, especially if I don't have to sit, edit and upload her video every night. For simplicity is probably the main requirement, even at the expense of quality.

Pete
 
I have an older JVC that has an AV input mode. I also bought a waterproof "pipe" camera from Henries Radio and can connect it up and use that to video the underside of the boat or the sea bed (about 10 meters of cable) and record it on my standard JVC video recorder.
 
Well we bought the flip to take on holiday. Have to say for the money we are very impressed. Very simple to use, just like a point a shoot camera (with zoom option) so no problem SWMBO managing to use it. It survived a fall of 4 feet onto concrete so quite robust. Camera shake doesn't seem to be a problem even when the kids were using it.

Video quality also suprisingly good and very clear when played on a laptop at You Tube size. No fussy software or formats to worry about, she just connected it and pressed play.

So in conclusion very impressed, simple to use and cheap enough to keep on board without the tears if it went MOB. /forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif

Pete
 
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