Further technical features

Buying advice

Product group: Camcorder
Items analyzed: 85
Date: 18. 05. 2012
Data source: QualityZoom
Realtime Analytics

Hard drive and Flash Camcorders are easy to handle and use, just like DVDs, MPEG 2 as video format. Instead of time-consuming finalizing the media, they use a USB cable or a card reader to transfer video data to the PC. Flash Camcorder: you can do anything with these cameras because they use a flash card and do not have any mechanism, they are less sensitive to shaking and roughness. That is why they are very good for outdoor use such as mountain bike tours or skiing vacations. Flash Camcorders mostly use SD, MMC cards or one of many varieties of memory sticks and profit from cheap material prices (e.g. 4 GB SD-Card: 40 - 50 Euros). Concerning resolution and picture quality, the chip camcorders are not as good as serious cameras. Affordable units mostly only have one picture sensor, while high-quality camcorders use a 3-CCD chip and achieve better picture quality. In short: Flash-Camcorders are ideal for traveling. They do not have any mechanisms, are robust and withstand activities like bike-tours and skiing vacations. Cheap models often have a poor picture and motion quality, but it is enough for home-movies and YouTube. If you want long recording times, you should get a hard drive camcorder, which can have more than 60 GB memory. However, if you really want to record for hours, it depends more on the capacity of your batteries.

Glossary

Harddisk Camcorder

This records directly to a hard drive, which is expensive, but offers a lot of storage space for recordings. Most modern models dispose of 30 to 60 GB, and at times even 120 GB capacity. Professionals mostly use harddrives as external storage devices, regardless the recording without tape is just slowly coming to stay in TV- and cinema productions. The majority of consumer-harddisk camcorders record image material in compressed MPEG 2 format. This form allows for fast transfer to the PC, but are often incompatible with all common editing software which makes them useless for serious working.

Storage Card Camcorder

These camcorders record data on a storage card (mostly SD = Secure Digital Card), are small and need no mechanical drive, which makes them insensitive against tremor. Modern storage cards can currently store up to 8GB of film material, while as 1 GB is needed for 13 minutes of film. The storage devices models compress the data strongly and write it as MPEG2 or MPEG4, which makes them hard to handle in editing. Professional cameras can write on storage cards as well, however they use a more professional recording format.

MPEG2 (Moving Picture Experts Group)

Commonly the MPEG2-format is used by harddisks- or storage card-camcorders for recording. Because of the higher compression this format uses up less space on a computer harddisk than the DV-format. However this often takes a toll when it comes to image quality. Should a device record videos in MPEG2, it is usually able to record in Surround-sound.