What are the key features in a video camera?

Question

? I'm looking into buying a high quality one, what are the key features?

Answer 1

If you're doing professional kind of stuff, or just high-end home videos, I'd say the importants are:

- 3 ccd's as opposed to only one

- the bigger the ccd's, the better, e.g., 1/3 ccds are better than 1/4

- microphone jack - allows you to plug in an external microphone so you don't have crappy audio

- good manual control for those pesky situations : including focus, white balance, aperture, gain, etc.

- good optical zoom - digital zoom is c**p and doesn't matter at all

- hot shoe on top for accessories

- what it records to should fit your needs:

      minidv is still used by most professionals as it is uncompressed, best quality, but it can get confusing with so many tapes

      memory cards are up and coming and very handy, yet they are compressed files and leave artifacts and stuff

      straight to dvds are handy, but there aren't really anyways to edit them yet i dont think

      i have no idea about hard drive cameras

that's all i really look for