h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi. I was wondering if you knew what the minimum standard was for a decent digital camera to give a decent quality picture.

Is there something I should look for in a camera if I want to make some short films?

I currently have a digital camcorder. Nice enough for video-auditions and basic video-blog type stuff but I'm looking to invest in something to make a quality end product, perhaps for use in my show-reel.

Thanks in advance,

Mat

Great time to buy! The prices were already down due to technology advances and now the recession has brought them down further. With a little searching and haggling, you might be able to afford the best. Which is what?

Presently 1080p 16:9 HD on some kind of flash memory. This too will change but for now it's best available for commercial HD television. Now if you want to stick with SD, your digital camcorder would do fine if you feed it good audio and edit digitally. The thing about digital is compression, compression, compression so the better the compression ratio the *cleaner* the picture and sound. I'm shooting DVC Pro 50 16:9 on tape and it's being bumped up to some very nice HD footage. Not as good as the DVHD I record on the other camera on P2 cards (PMCIA cards that are arrays of SD cards). It's all a matter of scale and expense, if you have tens of thousands of dollars available, get a *Red* and record raw data on hard drives.

http://www.red.com/cameras/

If your budget is a fraction of that, try the P2 camera line.

http://www.abelcine.com/store/product.php?productid=10884

(The smaller version of the HVX 2000 I use- note you'll need a couple of hard drives to store and a computer to edit)

If the budget is even smaller, try this-

http://www.mobilewhack.com/reviews/sanyo_hd1_worlds_smallest_hd_camera.html

Although it records only 720, it might fit your purposes.

Anyway, your question reminds me of the zen quote *How long is a piece of string*. All I can answer is *as long as you want it*.

Wow. thanks. Thats a lot of string.