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October 07, 2005
[ HERE’S YOUR DIGICAM MR DE MILLE ]
Why do almost all digital still cameras take motion video pictures? Because they can, that’s why.
It’s a function of the electronic shutter used in consumer digicams that makes moving video possible. Digital single lens reflex cameras can’t do this trick because they have mechanical shutters that don’t move fast enough.
The promise of a video recording facility in a basic digital camera excites some potential customers. They really do think that they are getting two cameras for the price of one.
Pentax, a couple of years ago, marketed one of their models, the Optio MX, as a 2 in 1 camera. Even its shape suggested a hybrid, being a little bit like a video camera and a little bit like a still camera. With a 3.2 megapixel sensor it ought to have been able to deliver images on a par with a good videocam but it was constrained by limitations other than sensor density. In the current Casio range the EX-P505 is marketed as a hybrid camera even though it looks like a tiny SLR.
The most obvious restraint on a dual function camera is that digital still cameras use expensive memory cards as the image storage medium. Videocams use cheap tape or recordable DVD. A relatively inexpensive tape may hold an hour or more of video. An expensive 1 gigabyte high speed SD memory card will only fit 10 minutes of video at top quality -- and “top quality” is 640 by 480 pixel images at 30 frames per second.
dpexpert has tested the video mode in a number of cameras -- Pentax, Kodak, Fujifilm, Casio, Nikon, Canon and Panasonic -- and is inclined to view it as a gimmick that is relatively cheap to incorporate into any still camera. Picture quality is poor on a standard television screen. It is more acceptable at reduced area on a computer monitor.
Sound quality is always inferior, so it is best to think of digicam video as silent movies. Some camera functions are locked off when the video recording mode is selected. On most cameras autofocus, focal length and exposure are set and locked when the first frame is exposed.
However, the movie record function does have some applications. We have shot some beaut spontaneous clips of family events. Little video clips of holidays and family milestones can be emailed and as more and more people join the broadband the size of the video files can increase. And these little videos are ideal for including in PowerPoint presentations.
A word of warning: different cameras record video in different formats and PowerPoint is very choosy about the format it accepts. Nero is a good program for converting video formats, although finding one that a particular version of PowerPoint will accept can be a trial and error process. AVI1 seems to be acceptable to most versions of PowerPoint.
As we know from recent events digicam video is also ideal for on-the-spot recording of catastrophes and low resolution clips are now a regular feature in TV newscasts. One 20 second disaster clip will probably pay for your camera.
If you are a blogger -- and who isn’t these days? -- it is possible to insert small video clips by using a video host service. Audioblog provides such a service for streaming video and they have a video tutorial on the web site that shows how to upload the movie direct from the camera’s memory card and then insert the link into the body of the blog. The service costs U$50 a year after a free 7 day trial.
The attraction of the digicam video is that it is usually spontaneous, although no doubt someone somewhere right now is working on a scripted and acted epic shot entirely on a pocket digital camera. We look forward to the Ben Hur remake shot entirely on a Canon or Nikon digicam.
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Posted by terry at October 7, 2005 11:26 AM
