dinther
08-14-2005, 10:39 PM
Hi, I have been all over the net to find a good camcorder / photo camera.
The cheap all in one camera's look very appealing were it not that the image quality is an absolute shocker. What a waste to engineer such intricate devices and then stick a crap lens on them.
So I started to look at photo camera's that also do video. Plenty of choice but shock horror, I find so far all those camera's produce video in MJPEG format that result in video roughly 1 MByte per second. Take a GIG card and you have a lousy 16 minutes of video. Not good enough.
The camera I want to buy should be cheapish. It is a tool that will go along to the beach on our beach patrols and I should not have to be overly worried about a knock a drop or worse. I mean I don't like to lose any camera but loss of a $200 cam is easier to deal with that losing a $1000 camera.
So basically I would like a camera that can do 320 x 200 AND 640 x 480 at a minimum of 24 frames per second in MPEG4 compression (including mono audio of course). I prefer MPEG4 because that translates in at least an hour or so capacity on a 1 Gig card.
A limited optical zoom would be good (At least that proves the thing has a real lens). At the same time I want to be able to make photo's at reasonable snapshot quality of say 3.1 MP. USB 2 for fast transfer and AV plug would be good too.
Can someone recommend me a camera that will do the job. A reference to online sample resources both photo and video would be appreciated.
Thanks
Paul.
The cheap all in one camera's look very appealing were it not that the image quality is an absolute shocker. What a waste to engineer such intricate devices and then stick a crap lens on them.
So I started to look at photo camera's that also do video. Plenty of choice but shock horror, I find so far all those camera's produce video in MJPEG format that result in video roughly 1 MByte per second. Take a GIG card and you have a lousy 16 minutes of video. Not good enough.
The camera I want to buy should be cheapish. It is a tool that will go along to the beach on our beach patrols and I should not have to be overly worried about a knock a drop or worse. I mean I don't like to lose any camera but loss of a $200 cam is easier to deal with that losing a $1000 camera.
So basically I would like a camera that can do 320 x 200 AND 640 x 480 at a minimum of 24 frames per second in MPEG4 compression (including mono audio of course). I prefer MPEG4 because that translates in at least an hour or so capacity on a 1 Gig card.
A limited optical zoom would be good (At least that proves the thing has a real lens). At the same time I want to be able to make photo's at reasonable snapshot quality of say 3.1 MP. USB 2 for fast transfer and AV plug would be good too.
Can someone recommend me a camera that will do the job. A reference to online sample resources both photo and video would be appreciated.
Thanks
Paul.