3 Video Cameras ?

This a quick look at 3 video cameras that glide up the price scale from just over $100 to $500 and then $1000. I have chosen these video cameras because they go beyond what you would expect in each case of a video camera. So without further to do:

The Flip

The Flip seems small and not much bigger than many a mobile phone – 4.1 x 2.3 x 1.3 inches and weighing about a pound. It has a simple fixed f2.8 lens and a viewing screen of 1.5 inches diagonal. The digital zoom adds 2x range but at the cost of video quality. The video quality is 640 x 480 pixels recording MPEG4. Oh and builtin speakers and microphone. There are just 8 buttons to control the unit – Power, Play, Delete, Record and 4 way navigation.

At first glance The Flip looks … well pretty flippant in specs. No interchangeable memory card, no still pictures, and no optical zoom. Beyond the price – $100 at Amazon for the basic unit, there is not a lot that would attract attention. End of story. Well not exactly – The Flip own 13% of the video camera market – whats going on here ?

Simplicity and good internal tech specs. A lot of people like the simplicity of the camera – only 8 buttons in contrast to the dozens that you have to master on many video cameras. You download images from th Flip onto your PC with a swiveling USB port or for viewing on a TV with a simple cable. But the real winner is that The Flip takes pretty good pictures. 640 x 480 is not HD but its well above what most mobile phones or even point and shoot digital cameras can do. Even better the camera has great performance in lowlight conditions. The f2.4 lens helps as well as the CMOS sensor for high quality film. So many users are delighted they a)can easily use the camera and b)it outperforms their snotty neighbors movies….. and all for a Ben.

Sanyo Xacti E1

In contrast to The Flip, the Sanyo Xacti grabs you right away – 5X optical zoom camera with 2.5″ viewer that you can take upto 5 feet underwater for over an hour taking video. Wow!

And the camera sells for a lot less than $500 on Amazon and Sanyo throws in a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements (a very good video editor, see our review here). And it fits naturally in your hand but also has a 2.5″ screen viewer. Wow! Wow!

And the camera is fractions bigger yet lighter than The Flip ( at 2.8 x 1.6 x 4.4 inches and 8 ounces). With 1GB of memory, you can shoot 75 minutes of footage at 640×480 resolution, at 30 frames per second. And you can swap out the SD card with one of your own – say 8GB which will allow for ten hours of video – or 4000 6MB still images. And you can take still images at the same time as you are recording movies. Wow! Wow! Wow!

And as one views the detailed specs the wowing just continues. There is both a video and still image stabilizer for shake and blur free images. Like The Flip, the Xacti-E1 has 2 lux low light sensitivity. And the Xacti-E1 has a built-in flash with 3 modes of operation for taking still pictures from 1/2 to 1/2000th of a second. There is a stereo microphone but mono speaker for playback with the 2.5″ TFT viewing screen. The lithium ion batteries have the following specs for still shooting: approximately 160 stills (CIPA standard), Video clips and continuous shooting mode lasts about 80 min. and playback for about 190 min.

The camera consistently garners three complaints. First, you need a second battery especially if you are going to do a ll afternoon shooting. Second, the still image at the same time as video recording does cause the movie images to flicker. And the low light still images slightly off. However, I have not yet been able to test a unit to see what the results are and if there are any workarounds. But for the price and goodies tis is a very attractive still … no video … you see what I mean.

Casio Exilim EX-F1

We have already covered this $1000 SLR/cross video camera in detail, so I will just emphasize the differences with the other video(?) cameras. First, the EX-F1 has wider zoom (35mm film equivalent of about 36 to 432mm, longer battery life and most importantly for vido-philes the ability to record at HD quality.

The Casio specs for HD movies are very impressive at 1920 x 1080 (FHD, 60 fields per second), 1280 x 720 (HD, 30 fps). But also lower resolutions are pretty impressive at 512 x 384 (300 fps, 30-300 fps), 432 x 192 (600 fps), 336 x 96 (1200 fps). Remember fps=frames per second – so, yes the last figure is for 1200 frames per second.

Again we cannot testify yet to hands on experience and testing of the video and still image quality. However, the range of performance is very impressive – especially for HD video.

Summary

What sets these video cameras apart besides their high quality for price ratio, is that every one is also still camera adept(okay, so you have to use The Flip’s iTunes or PC video software to pluck out stills). And at 6Mpixels for the two top video cameras, this is more than enough for most website use and commercial correspondence – or 6×4 prints. In short these video cameras are testament to the move from still cameras to dual mode, video and still. True, they will not replace highend SLRs for their image quality and shooting gamut – but I suspect at the lowend, another hardware revolution is on the way.
To see the latest on video technology read about the 3 Topend Video Cameras.