Greggie Boy

Iwould appreciate suggestion on what to buy oreven what to look for. Here the deal.
I want a video camera that will take still photos also or a digital camera that will also take videos. If it can be used as a webcam that would be a plus. It is a gift for the grand kids to use on my pc. I'm in Canada so Cdn links perferred.
I'm really not tooconcerned about the price as long as it performs well.

My pc has both USB & Firewire if that makes a difference.

Thanks in advance

suprasteve

well you need to think about this first, a digital still camera will take great still shots but its video will leave something to be desired and it should also be less expensive. A video camera will take great video and decent still images (not nearly as many options for the shot typically though) and cost considerably more. So it's sort of a question of whether you want video or image quality foremost

Greggie Boy

Thanks Suprasteve:
Image quality more important. I'm confused about optical zoom vs digital zoom ? Any suggestiions ?
thanks

ceewi1

Optical zoom actually moves the lens to zoom in on the subject, as a normal camera would. There is no loss of quality. Digital zoom just enlarges the image, causing quality loss. IMO, there's really very little point to digital zoom, as any image editing program will do that for you. Basically, don't believe the hype about 400x zoom, or similar figures - just look at the optical zoom rating when making your decision.

While you can use a digital video camera as a webcam, i've found it to be quite annoying to balance it properly to get the image desired. Given how cheap webcams are these days, i'd buy one seperately.

As suprasteve has said, you really need to decide what you want to use first. Reasonably priced digital cameras are very limited in their ability to take videos. You're usually restricted to short, low quality takes.

Here's a couple of articles you may find useful:
http://www.scrapjazz.com/topics/Phot...graphy/414.php
http://www.photoxels.com/article-opt...ital-zoom.html

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Greggie Boy

Thanks Ceewi1
Very helpful and apreciated.

hammer1

krimson_king

not true. a less expensive example would be the canon powershot a620. very good image quality, and i was even surprised at how good the video qulaity was. considerably more video options than previous models, but very memory-greedy.


also not true. there is a loss of quality, certainly, although unnoticable when compared to digital zoom.

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