My good friend Barry is expecting his first child and the question of a video camera came up. I of course, have lot’s of opinion on the subject, but actually from very recent experience with the birth of my daughter. So I weighed in on the subject gave my 2 cents.
In short, don’t get a video camera. What I mean is, getting just a video camera is a waste, you wont use it past the first few times.
What we did instead was got a good pocket-point-and-shoot that also shoots video. It was good enough, since I am NOT a videographer. All the bells and whistles on a camera never really get used, so in the end all you should care about is the picture quality and size of the device itself. By getting a point and shoot with video, you are getting two devices in 1, so you only ever need 1 thing in your pocket.
It might have been the smartest device decision I have made in a long time.
On the con-side for a single device. The sound is not great, but its good enough I think in most cases. Many cameras don’t allow you to zoom while recording video, only while not recording, which makes no technical sense to me except to get people to buy a video camera because they think they need to zoom during video recording… You don’t, it makes you look like you are shooting wanes world intros…
I went with the Casio Exilim ex-275 and would recommend it or similar. Size is smaller than my wallet. It shoots 7.2 megapixel stills @4:3 ratio which is what you are probably used to and 640×480 video@30 frames per sec. The lens doesn’t suck. Big rear display. Simple controls.
What to look for:
Size. If it doesn’t fit in your pocket, you will never bring it with you when you think you might not need it. Always bring it…
Lens. Glass good, not glass, bad. Bigger lens = more light = better picture. Better lens = less aberration = better picture.
Real zoom matters, digital zoom ignore (and frankly turn it off right when you buy it since its actually just cropping and zooming the photo so you lose data/detail).
Flip/rotatable screen. Important to some folks. Im very good at blind aiming, so I didn’t care about that. Up to you.
Memory format – don’t buy a sony, expensive memory. Get something that uses SD would be my advice, since it is the most established and cheapest.
Megapixels are important, but only when the lens is better. A crappy lens will take a crappy photo, so you will see the crappiness in better detail with higher MP. But with a good lens, mp can matter. So with a better lens, bigger MP matters, crappier lens, MP becomes less important. Yes you can blow up a bigger MP photo to a larger size, but what looks like shit at 3×5 is gonna look like bigger shit at 8×10.
For video, make sure it shoots at least 640×480 @30fps (though it may say 29fps which is fine). Also make sure it can shoot as long as you want. Some cameras limit the time to 30 seconds, dumb, though you should mentally limit most shots to under 45 seconds anyway as a good practice.
Tripod – buy this thing: http://www.joby.com/products/gorillapod/original/ its great and you can find it cheap probably and you will be surprised how much you use it.
This site is awesome for info, but overloading. http://www.dpreview.com/
If you really want a video camera, the same rules apply, lens, zoom, format, etc. I’ll look for it on ebay in a few months…
It
though last night, colbert seemed like he was reaching his wits end. I wonder how many hours they must be currently working, and frankly the rest of the staff owes those two big time for keeping them employed.