I'm looking into buying a cheap camcorder for my brother so he can record moments of his new born on the way. Looking at the flash based pocket camcorders due to ease of transfer to PC/web and size (with a million other baby things to bring everywhere you go, the cam should be easy to throw in a bag/pocket).

Anyone with experience with the new Kodak Zi6, Aiptek GVS, Insignia HD, or Pure MioHD?

Thanks!

We have a nine month old baby at home, so just before she was born we bought a JVC Everio camcorder:

http://www.jvc.ca/en/consumer/presen...8/stylish.html

It's got a hard disk inside, not flash, but it's still easy to operate, small and does a great job.

That being said, we really don't use it that much. Our youtube and flickr site is full of 30 - 60 second video clips of the baby, and almost all of them were shot on our digital camera, not our camcorder. Most people don't want to watch more than 60 seconds of video at a time anyway, so the camera is ideal. We also take it with us almost everywhere we go, so we're always shooting video with it.

So I'd shoot some sample video with their digital camera and see if they're happy with it. (Note that digital SLRs aren't as good with this.)

Also, a quick note about HD video. High-Def is all the rage right now and if they're shopping for a camcorder a salesguy might talk them into it, but it's important to remember you need a lot of disk space to store high definition movies, and a good processor and a lot of RAM to edit them.

Finally, if they're going to be shooting baby pictures and videos I'd STRONGLY recommend looking at an online backup services like this:

http://www.carbonite.com/

I know it's $50 per year, but 10 years ago they'd've likely spent 10X that each year in film, processing and blank videotapes.

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No, but I've got a Panasonic SDR-S7 which is pretty similar - if a little pricy for what you get (I paid $199 on Amazon on a sale, it generally runs $20-40 higher.)

Good optics, good quality in good lighting but rapidly becomes so-so to poor as the lighting gets worse - in good lighting, beats my old Hi-8 but the video quality (loss of saturation, contrast, and introduction of noise) falls off a lot quicker.

Image stabilization is electronic and not very good although a littler better than no stabilization - a good optical stabilized camcorder would be much better for handheld stuff.

Shoots raw Mpeg2 which is good if you are going straight to DVD, but otherwise wastes a TON of card space compared to ones that go directly to a more compressed format. On the other hand, artifacts have not generally been an issue, and cards are cheap as dirt.

Size is nice - it's almost shirt-pocketable but still feels like an actual camcorder rather than a rectangular/flat digicam. Andhaving a full 10x zoom in such a small package is very nice.

Last quibble: battery life is very short, about 45 min of active taping on a charge. On the other hand, aftermarket batteries are around $10, and quite small, so you can easy travel with a couple.

At present prices, if you're looking in that range, I'd look at the Canon FS100. It was pricier when I got mine, while without the sale you are looking at very close to the same prices. It's got a better resolution which may help the video quality (and improve the electronic stabilization, and make digital zoom potentialyl more practical)... at the expense of a slightly chunkier size, and slightly less bright lens - I don't know if the low-light performance is any better.

Thanks for the feedback.

I ended up buying the Insignia HD cam a couple of weeks ago when they were having a bundle package deal. Tested it for a few days and was overall happy with the results. Daylight quality was great, indoor in dim lighting was grainy but useable. I liked the fact that it was on and ready record a second after opening the screen.

I had also bought the new Sony Webbie cam that just came out, used it for 10 minutes, put it back in the box, and returned it. Was worse then my cell phone video capability.

I'm curious - per my post above - Are the movies that come from the HD cam huge and difficult to edit? Or do you have a fast PC with giant hard disk that makes it a non issue?

I've been trying to figure out how to deal with HD video, when an hour of it is 20 gigabytes (or whatever).

There are a couple of concerns in editing HD video:

1. Format: Better HD consumer camcorders record to ACVHD or HDV. Most prosumer editors handle HDV. Some also handle ACVHD. Both require a reasonably heft PC for editing. Both ACVHD and HDV generally are limited to 13.7 gigabytes per hour, the same limitation as miniDV.

Some cheaper consumer camcorders use various proprietary formats. These will be very difficult to edit unless the camcorder manufacturer provides conversion software. Without it, you'll have a hard time finding editing software.

2. Editing hardware: Generally, editing ACVHD or HDV requires, at minimum, a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo (or equivalent) processor and, absolute minimum, 2 gigabytes of memory. However, the weak link in the chain is, usually, the graphics card -- a reasonably powerful card is needed for real-time preview when editing. For example, my Sony Vaio laptop, which has a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo and 2 gigabytes, can manage HDV editing when using the laptop's screen but if I try to use it with an external HDMI monitor, previews freeze.

3. Compression: Hard disk and SSD consumer camcorders generally use very, very high compression rates. Transcoding from a highly-compressed format to something editable and then re-transcoding to either DVD (mpeg2) or BluRay DVD will result in significant quality loss. This problem will be increased by adding special effects, transitions, titles, etc.

Since I was evaluating the cheap (<$200) "HD" type flash camcorders, you should take high-def lightly, which I fully understood going into it. The Insignia model that I ended up buying records HD at 1280x720 pixels at 30fps. The sensor is 5MP (2592x1944), so this means video is being created by some kind of interpolation between groupings of pixels. This is done probably because the sensor refresh rate or sensitivity is not really up to handling a 1:1 output at 30fps or higher.

Is the image really HD, no. Is it better than my digital camera or cell phone, yes.

The videos I took were ~1min long and were ~25mb. The format was AVI and they use h.264 encoding for compression. It was easy enough to edit in Windows Movie Maker on a 3yr old dual core athlon with 3GB of memory in XP.

Hope this helps.

That's 720i ("i" means "interlaced"). Broadcast HD is almost always 1080i or 720p ("p" means "progressive"). However, this is only half the story. Compression rate means everything. The high compression rates needed for inexpensive consumer solid-state HD means that image will be poor and won't really look like HD.

Not necessarily and, in fact, for low-cost consumer machines it is highly unlikely that it does sub-sampling. More than likely, the higher pixel count is so that it can do still imaging. For video, it will use a section of the sensor.

Pixel counts are meaningless for video (except in high-price machines that do sub-sampling) as the resolution of a video frame is fixed and fairly low:

HD:
1080: 1920 x 1080 pixels
720: 1280 x 720

Standard definition non-digital
720 x 480 pixels

Standard definition digital (480p or 480i)
640 x 480

Indeed, higher pixel counts (counts above the frame resolution) are undesirable because the smaller pixels are less light sensitive and dramatically degrade low-light performance.

Um, no. That's not right, sorry.

This has nothing to do with sensor refresh rates. HD is either progressive or interlaced. In the US, a progressive image has a frame rate of 60 frames per second. An interlaced image has a frame rater of 30 frames per second, but each frame is broken up into two fields of alternating lines, transmitted as 60 fields per second. Persistance of vision reassmables the split fields into a single frame. This is a holdover from analog television.

Because the maximum frame resolution of HD-standard video is 1080, the maximum number of pixels used to make that image is 1920 (horizontal) by 1080 (vertical). There's no point in using more pixels (absent sub-sampling) because it doesn't conform to the standard and no additional resolution will be realized.

Cheap HD camcorders will use interlaced video because it takes up roughly 50% space to store. Even good consumer tape-based camcorders, like the Canon HD-30, use 1080i (and HDV is actually 1440 horizontal 1440 with a1:33 aspect ratio -- this is done to stay within the same 1 hour per miniDV tape limits as miniDV), use interlaced video rather than progressive, though there are some new tape-based progressive machines on the horizon.

It is HD in that it conforms to the spec. It is of substantially lower quality, however, than BluRay DVDs, ATSC broadcast HD, HDV or ACVHD machines. It is also lower quality than good consumer and prosumer standard definition miniDV camcorders.

AVI isn't a format. It's a file spec for a container that can hold a variety of different formats. h.264 is an implementation of MPEG4 that uses very high compression to yield low bit rates. BluRay uses a version of mpeg4, but a different standard and a much higher bit rate.

Well sure, at such a low data bandwidth far less power is required to edit.

PTravel: Thanks for taking the time to write such a comprehensive reply. That was really helpful.

PTravel,
Your expansion on the topic could be beneficial for someone wanting to dig deep into how video is recorded, but I must point out some points that should be clarified:

You are correct that compression rates do mean everything, but you should be careful to not relate this directly to image quality. You can use compression without high losses in quality. The video quality of cheap cams has more to do with the optics and sensor used than it does the compression method. The compression method is utilized so that the recording media (SD cards or internal SSD) can be used while providing enough recording time.

I'm not sure you or I know this to be true or not. We can agree that it absolutely uses the full pixel count for still images. But, in my line of work we use liquid cooled CCD's that have sensitivity to DUV. The sensor has ~1000x1000 pixels. Instead of analyzing the raw pixel data, we use an averaging algorithm that takes the average value of a 3x3 array of pixels and uses that average for the middle pixel. If digi-cam makers didn't do something similar I'd be surprised as it is a very simple software implementation.

I was not inferring that refresh rates of CCD's and frame rates of video are one in the same. But you can improve sensitivity and noise by using averaging.

As was stated in previous posts, it was already known that it was not "true" HD. But let me know when you find a miniDV camcorder that is ~$100 and you can upload the video clips to your PC in a matter of seconds that still look good on your big screen TV.

Exactly what I was getting at in that post.

Of course. All consumer and prosumer video is compressed -- it has to be. However, the extent of compression is directly related to video quality. The more compression, the more information is lost, and the more artifacts will result.

Well, that's what I said. However, high compression is used for the same reason that cheap glass is used -- because it's inexpensive and the assumption is that consumers won't care. There are solid-state professional digicams that have both low compression rates and excellent glass.


That's sub-sampling. To my knowledge, only prosumer camcorders subsample.

I have a miniDV-based camcorder that is $600 and produces HD video so good it is used for B-roll in professional productions.

PTravel, you seem to be stuck on your pedestal unable to recognize that this thread is regarding cheap camcorders. The whole point was to find one that provided decent quality (again, better than video from P&S digital camera or cell phone) that was cheap enough to 1-give as a gift, 2-throw around with everything else parents of newborns travel with.

AVCHD is highly compressed without significant loss of quality. Just really hard to edit.

Of course there are professional cams with SSD with low compression and good glass --> $$$$$.

Congrats, but you still didn't meet either of the two criterias I requested....

The OP asked about cheap flash camcorders, I advised against HD because of the processor, RAM and disk space required. You then indicated you had purchased a quasi-HD camcorder and PTravel then provided a lot of good general info about how HD camcorders work.

It's not like he hijacked your thread or ate your bandwidth. Chill out, dude.