Choosing The Right Camcorder For You?

Answer 1

Modern digital camcorders are smaller, more portable, and have more features than ever in history. High-quality camcorders come in all shapes and sizes and prices. To choose the right camcorder for your needs, you'll want to ask yourself a few questions, including:

• Do I need control over my footage ... or not?
• What features do I need?
• What format makes the most sense for my videos?

The kind of camcorder you choose depends primarily on what you intend to do with it. If you simply want to shoot short clips to post small videos on a website, then you won't need much control over the footage you shoot. If you want to be more creative, however, you'll want to choose a camcorder with manual controls, such as selectable exposure, shutter speeds, and more. What you are looking for is a camcorder that let's you enhance the footage you shoot.

Knowing what features you need on your camcorder can help you narrow the choices.

• Shooting up close or far away? You'll need plenty of zoom range. You'll want to consider a camcorder with an optical zoom that let's you take closeups. Some camcorders have image stabilization, a feature that helps keep your video steady even if your hand shakes while zooming.
• Want to shoot photographs too? You'll want a camcorder that has a digital photo mode to allow you to take still images in addition to shooting film.
• Want to post videos to websites or social networking sites? You'll want a web-friendly camcorder that records video in a web-friendly format to avoid the time, effort, and software involved with converting it.
• Some of the formats you can get your camcorder footage in, include the following:
• Mini DV is for those people who want to later do precise editing of their videos on a computer.
• DVD is for those people who want to have and share instant copies of their footage with friends and family.
• Hard drive and flash memory options are for those people who don't want to bother with external memory and are comfortable using flash memory cards. This option also allows easy transfer to their computer or to the web.