HD camcorders: Buyer's guide
A walk through today’s electronics emporiums, hotel rooms, and sports bars, as well as through a vast number of living rooms, reveals that we’re well on our way to reflecting reality in high definition. Broadcast television is going completely digital; HD movie downloads are becoming more common; and the large, analog cathode-ray tube TVs of old are about as relevant as the Model T. Given our increasingly high-def landscape, is it time to consider an HD camcorder?
Features and functions
All HD camcorders have a lens, a sensor that captures video and converts it to digital information, an LCD that displays video, a storage medium, and a way to move video from the camcorder to a computer. But there’s variety in these elements, as well as in the resolutions and frame rates the camcorders can capture video in. Also, some models offer extra features that you might want to consider.
Lens Full-size camcorders (as opposed to pocket camcorders such as the Flip MinoHD and Kodak Zi6) have lenses with optical zoom—the kind of zoom controlled by movement of the lens elements. All today’s full-size consumer camcorders have at least a 10x optical zoom. The image you get from an optical zoom is as crisp and clear as the lens can make it. In addition to optical zoom, these camcorders offer digital zoom that extends the reach of the optical zoom. (You could, for example, have a camcorder with a 15x optical zoom and a 180x digital zoom.) Digital zoom enlarges the image by making pixels larger, which leads to softer video (similar to scaling up an image in Adobe Photoshop).
Sensor At one time, digital camcorders contained CCD (charge-coupled device) sensors—imaging sensors that work in tandem with a separate processor to convert images to digital information. Most of today’s camcorders use CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) sensors. CMOS chips are less expensive, require less power, and can be made smaller than CCD chips.
A sensor’s size and makeup can make a difference to your video. The larger a sensor is, the better its low-light performance is likely to be (so you’ll see less grain in video captured in low-light conditions). Also, the more pixel elements a sensor has (and the larger they are), the sharper the image usually is.
LCD Many modern full-size camcorders sport touch-screen LCDs you use not only to view your video but also to access a camcorder’s many recording and playback features. (Pocket camcorders have far smaller displays, and they have buttons rather than touch-screen controls.) On some camcorders, the LCD also acts as the sole viewfinder.
Storage Most full-size camcorders provide either tape-based or tapeless storage. And the way a camera stores its data hints at the kind of video format it uses.
Although tape is on its way out as a storage medium in HD camcorders, manufacturers including Canon, Sony, and JVC still make some tape-based cameras. These cameras shoot in the HDV (high-definition video) format, which uses the MPEG-2 compression codec, and they usually record onto standard MiniDV tapes.
Video from HDV camcorders looks great, and tapes can be convenient for archival purposes. The disadvantages of tape are that your shooting time is limited—a tape holds an hour of video—and unlike with tapeless camcorders, you don’t have instant access to individual clips. Instead, you have to wind through the tape to find the clip you want. Also, you have to capture footage from the tape in real time: if you shoot for an hour, it will take at least an hour to transfer all the footage to your computer.
Tapeless camcorders store their data on hard drives, flash memory chips, MiniDVD discs, or removable memory cards (and some cameras use multiple media). These cameras use the AVCHD (Advanced Video Codec High Definition) format—a high-definition format that uses the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 codec.