Anyone seen this digital camera?
- From: Simpolman <bikepilgrim@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2007 21:15:50 -0000
My buddy and I are a couple of those crunchy granola munching bike
packers that you sometimes see pedaling up steep mountain roads early
on rainy mornings. We really enjoy our trips, but we always wish that
we could somehow record them to show our friends when we get home. So
we thought we'd appeal to the experts and ask what kind of camera we
should get.
We've tired several cameras before, but we can't seem to find one that
works just right for us. Our first was a digital still camera. It was
great in that it used AA batteries, which we have a solar-rechargeable
system for. The problem was that you couldn't really operate the
camera without the LCD display on and draining battery power. While
we're riding in the City we like to spontaneously stop, prop ourselves
up against a light post and take a shot of the other one bombing down
a hill. Still cameras are wonderful for this because they are so light
and compact. We can drop them in our handlebar bag easily and maybe
even find a way to secure them to our chests so we can pull them out
quickly.
The problem with the digicam, was that it could only shoot a certain
length of video at a time, which sucks for interviews of the random
street performers, and other colorful San Francisco natives. I wanted
to be able to let the video roll as long as it needs to. Also, the
video quality was less than great on the digicam, and the audio was
terrible. So I decided to drop the dough on a MiniDV camcorder. A
Panasonic that features a 3CCD chip. It recorded great video and audio
all by itself, and it had video and audio inputs so that we could
connect external mics and maybe a helmet cam if we ever got frisky.
Unfortunately it's battery life proved to be short, and it's batteries
expensive as hell. We couldn't charge them on the solar pack, so it
left us dependent on AC power. Also, on the one occasion I tried to
record while going down a hill, the video on the entire tape got
fucked up. That scared me so I don't want to use it while moving
anymore, which bites for a bike-umentary. Also, the recording
mechanism of MiniDV took too long for us. In order to start recording,
I would have to pull the considerably larger camera from my bag, flip
open it's screen, turn it on, wait for it to power up, then hit
record. By that time there could be cars coming and I'd have lost my
shot. The final reason that the MiniDV didn't work is that the post-
production process was too clunky and involved.
The trouble is that MiniDV has much higher quality than we need. We're
not looking to go to Cannes, or Sundance with our shots. Our target
medium is YouTube, who reccomends "MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at
320x240 resolution with MP3 audio". But that doesn't mean we don't
want good color, good auto-focus, and good sharpness. We want a camera
that will shoot only as high a quality as we will need, but if it
could also take video that could be of DVD quality or higher, that
would be a bonus.
I imagine that there must be some great little digi-cams coming out of
Asia that fit our requirements. A camera that records in medium to
high quality MP4, has high quality optics including auto-focus, image-
stabilization, and at least some optical-zoom, records to a cheap high
capacity removable storage, uses cheap, easy to find batteries that
can be solar-recharged, and is light, durable, and compact. A flash
for stills, audio/video inputs/outputs would be a plus.
Appreciative,
Pilgrim and Johnny
.
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