LG cellphone comes with image editor for clips
Gillian Shaw
Sun
Videotaping, once the purview of tourists and proud parents, has become ubiquitous among young consumers looking for fame on YouTube and among citizen journalists who want to share what they see with the world.
A powerful video released this week showing the last minutes of a distraught man’s life before he was hit by a police Taser at Vancouver International Airport was shot by a 25-year-old using a digital camera.
Images from citizen journalists are circling the globe on video-sharing and social networking sites or showing up on television news. They aren’t top quality videos, but they allow average people to record events that once went without an electronic witness.
Advances in digital technology mean amateurs can capture moving pictures with a device as simple as a cellphone, often for free.
LG has a cellphone that comes with a built-in image editor for photos and similar editing options for video that make it easy to produce clips ready to upload for mass consumption.
Video is also an add-on capability of many digital still photo cameras.
“The video quality is actually quite good with the point-and-shoot cameras,” said Christa LeCraw, camera department supervisor at Vancouver‘s Lens and Shutter.
With its PowerShot TX1, LeCraw said Cannon has managed to combine point and shoot convenience with a high definition video camera.
“That camera is kind of a hybrid that is unique to Canon at the moment,” she said. “It is a seven mega pixel camera but it also records in high definition.
“And it’s really small and tiny — about the size of a deck of cards and with a 10 times optical zoom.”
Canon hybrid records to a SD memory card — similar to cameras and most cellphones which use mini SD or micro SD memory cards — and costs $599.
But good quality video recording starts at less than half that price with mini DV tape cameras. The $329 Canon fits into that category.
“It is still a good camera,” said LeCraw. “You are recording onto tape so you are getting pretty good video quality.
Another category of camcorders rely on memory cards or in the case of Sony, the memory stick. While the most common memory cards come in two or four gigabytes, it is useful to have more for video camera. Storage capacity depends on the resolution, but most users will want eight- or 16-gigabyte cards.
Camcorders with removable memory can be tiny. Sony’s new HDR-CX7 records in high definition and fits in the palm of your hand. It also takes six mega pixel still photos and sells for $1,199.
Another category is the hard disk drive camcorder, which stores video on a built-in drive, similar to the memory on our computers. Canon has just released a new one, the HG10 at $1,299, that has a 40-gigabyte hard drive and records in 1080 resolution, which is considered high definition.
The Sony HDR SR1, the earliest version of hard disk drive camcorder sells for $899. The drawback to having all that onboard memory is that hours of video can be carried around in your camcorder so when you drop it in the lake or it’s stolen — if you haven’t downloaded all that video, you could lose a lot.
Broadcasters use the mini DV tapes, LeCraw said, because the tape has less compression and the video quality is the highest.
LeCraw said while some consumers don’t want to deal with tape, the job of uploading video is fairly easy with all models which connect to your computer via a USB cable. Software may be included with the camcorder or many people use other editing software such as iMovie or Final Cut.
At the higher end, the Canon XH A1 has recently dropped in price to $3 799, from $4,599. It is high definition, it has a professional level lens and while it’s larger than the consumer models, it’s a manageable size and offers broadcast quality video.
B.C.-based Lens and Shutter lists these cameras among their best-sellers:
Canon ZR830: $329
Canon Powershot TX1: $599
Sony HDR SR1: $899
Canon HG10: $1,299
Canon XH A1: $3,799
Sony HDR-CX7: $1,199