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Wish to buy a Digital Camcorder? Consider this First
You can’t buy a camcorder without knowing what the market has on offer and what features you want in the camcorder. So, here’s a guide to help you along.
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This should be your first question to yourself: how do you want to use your camcorder? When will you use it? Will you carry it with you or keep it only for special occasions? Do advanced features intimidate you or do you want to use all your camcorder’s fancy features as fast as you can?
How do you plan to use your camcorder?
- How much do you want to spend? The price range for camcorders begins at $149 and can go up to a fantastic $1,500 or more for very high-end camcorders. However, for $800, you could get a really good one.
- Do you want a pocket camcorder or a full featured one? Pocket camcorders are very popular even today since they are easy to use, affordable, and compact and the video can easily transferred to the PC and Net. However, their lenses are not of as good quality as in their full featured counterparts. One way of determining whether the model you’re looking at is a pocket camcorder or a full featured one is to look for the optical zoom lens. If there is no optical zoom lens, it’s a pocket camcorder.
- Which resolution do you prefer—SD or HD? Digital camcorder models could be had either with standard definition or high definition (HD). The former are relatively inexpensive and have video quality that’s good for computer viewing or non-HDTV. HD camcorders give you wide-screen viewing that’s just right for HDTV.
- Which media format should you look out for? The performance of your camcorder rests heavily on the kind of media it uses. Besides, media type also has an impact on the size, battery life, performance and weight of the camcorder. Whether you choose a SD or HD camcorder, you can choose to record on to flash memory cards, hard disk drives, built-in flash memory, tape or mini DVD discs. Certain HD models record directly on to Blu-ray discs.
- Core Features: Once you’ve made your basic choice depending on the parameters shown above, let’s move on to discuss the additional features you should look out for:
- Optical Zoom: If you want to shoot really close to your subject, you’re going to need a high-powered zoom lens. Zoom lenses can magnify objects up to a factor of 48x and more. So, choose wisely on this basis.
- Image Stabilization: This feature takes away the negative impact that your shaking hands can have on your picture quality, so look out for this one.
- Photo features: Can you use your camcorder as a camera? Of course, it has all the advanced features of a camera including flash, burst shooting, scene modes and exposure controls.
- Audio recording: With audio recording, you can shoot home movies, replete with surround sound.
- Style: Camcorders in stylish colors and designs are also available now, so take your pick.
Article by Mithi Chinoy
Tags: Digital Camcorder; Buying a Camcorder; Camcorder Features
