Video Camcorders and Cameras

It used to be that you used a camcorder to take video, a camera to take photos, and a cellphone to make phone calls. That has changed so much lately, that both are taking the back seat to cellphones. Cellphones are now capable of doing just about anything you can thing of. Need to call someone, use your cellphone. Want a quick video of that newborn for the grandparents, use your cellphone, or just a quick pic, use your cellphone.

Technology has evolved so much and so very fast. When they first introduced a cellphone that had built in camera, the photos were not really that good. However now, well the photos far exceed the mega-pixel (mp) of my first digital camera. In fact one of my more expensive digital cameras, a Sony FD-95, could not produce the same quality of pictures as the cellphones my wife and I currently use. That FD-95 when released brand new, would set you back around $1,000. Our cellphones cost barely more than $100.

Now when it comes to digital still cameras, and digital camcorders, both will do the other's job. Cameras not only take photographs, but can record video. Camcorders not only take video, but can take still photos. There's generally a trade-off with them. With a camera, the photos are generally very high resolution, but the videos not so much. The same with camcorders. The video is high-quality, but the photos are not. I think this type of style was just used more for marketing whichever product you had to sell. Each wanted to grab the other's market, so they offered an additional feature to facilitate it.

So what do you when you want to purchase one of them? Well, you need to consider what type of medium, media your end result will be used for. The media refers to where you're wanting to store, produce or share to. There's a lot of variables to consider for this. To store your videos for example, you want something that can record a good quality, but yet not have a large file size. Video requires a lot of storage space, to keep the original quality with some formats.

Storage for video can be in the form of external hard-drives, and DVDs. If you choose the latter, you need to decide on if you are going to just store the video files as data, or you want to produce a video DVD. They are quite different.

Anyway I'll discuss more about this a little later...