FEATURES

Quick summary

So you’ve made your choice of HD camcorders by BRAND, and sorted in your mind which digital video camera offers the recording FORMAT best suited to your needs, now you need to consider the many FEATURES on offer from the huge choice of the best digital camcorders available.

All are very important in their own right of course, but carefully consider the purpose of your purchase, read many camcorder reviews and choose wisely.

There are some check boxes to tick for all of us such as:

Optical Image Stabilization which corrects for a wide range of movement and vibration in a HD video camera. This combines gyroscopes and image-sensors to give amazing image stabilization.
Combined with Instant AF (Auto Focus) you’ll get ultra-quick, accurate focus.

Optical Zoom and Digital Zoom. Optical is better, as it does not distort the picture, whereas digital just enlarges the pixels in a picture and therefore dilutes the quality.

Good low light performance is very important for indoor shots, but some HD Camcorders have an auto illumination light built into the lens barrel, and for taking stills, a Built-in Auto Flash.
Some camcorders have Simultaneous Full HD Video & Still Shooting Modes up to 10MP Stills and 15fps Continuous Shooting (in still mode).

High Speed Transfer to the computer. You need a Firewire adaptor or a fast USB port unless your HD Camcorder uses the SD/HC cards which you just remove and insert directly into your computer.

Full HD recording (1920×1080). The whole point of buying HD camcorders. The highest compression format which some HD Camcorders record to is MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Movie Recording Format.

A good wide angle lens. 35mm is available now as standard on some brands.

Video light built into the lens barrel. Murky shots should be a thing of the past.

One Touch Upload to YouTube. The kids will demand this, and many adults will be thankful for this feature.

For the record, here are some of the many more features of any HD video camera listed below:

Embedded Flash memory, Twin Media HD and SD/HC Memory. These are the front runners of HD Camcorder technology in 2010.
Embedded flash memory is better than a hard drive as there are no moving parts, therefore reducing the cost of the HD Camcorder, as well as allowing for extended recording time from the battery.

Twin Media HD, sometimes called Hybrid has the embedded flash memory as well as a slot or sometimes two slots for SD/HC cards. This allows for really long recording time capability.

SD/HC card HD Camcorders are the cheapest option, cards are dropping dramatically in price, and it’s so convenient to remove the card to place into the computer for editing.

Some brands use MicroSD cards or MiniSD cards which serve the same purpose.
Single CCD/CMOS or 3 CCD/CMOS. These are the tiny electronic chips which convert the light into video signals. CCD is perhaps the better recognised, but CMOS chips are fast becoming the standard because of mass production at a much cheaper cost, therefore reducing the cost of the HD Camcorder.

AVCHD stands for Audio Video Compression for High Definition. Not all computers can handle this type of compression, but if yours can, it will allow you to get more recording time out of your SD card or HDD.

Time-Lapse Record. Some HD Camcorders now have this, sometimes called Interval Recording Mode. Have some fun with this recording sunrises or sunsets, flowers growing or whatever you can imagine looking effective when played back at normal speed. A tripod is vital for this type of recording though!

Touch Screen Viewfinder. This is the flip-out LCD viewfinder screen which as well as helping with framing your shots, also allows you to lock the focus onto several faces for a better image (Face Detection). This screen also displays remaining battery power, scene re-arranging on playback, date and time, and other data to help you get better recordings.

Bluetooth Wireless Technology, Wireless data transfer via Eye-Fi and GPS are also available.

Dual Record with 3.5MP still image capture. What is Dual Record with still image capture?
Dual record capability lets you capture 3.5MP still images while shooting high definition video, so you can capture those special moments without having to switch recording modes.