Digital camera that records video

August 23, 2004 7:46 PM

Are there any digital still cameras that have decent video capabilities yet? MiniDV level for at least 30 seconds would be ideal but perhaps unrealistic.
posted by smackfu to Technology (4 answers total)

Best answer: The Canon S1 IS actually has pretty decent video capabilities. The microphone is pretty weak but the image quality is quite good.
posted by Space Coyote at 7:50 PM on August 23, 2004

Response by poster: Oh, that is nice. The quality is certainly there on their sample video. The lack of compression is painful though. That 6 second video is 11 MB. I suppose that's tolerable if you're using 1 GB cards. Are we there yet?
posted by smackfu at 8:15 PM on August 23, 2004

Most Powershots take those IBM microdrives, so yes, we're there yet.
posted by dobbs at 9:16 PM on August 23, 2004

friend of mine has a 1 gig microdrive that'll work in my camera, but (as microdrives are supposedly more fragile than CF) i'd stick with the CF cards if you want to do it, unless the cost is prohibitive. with a 256 meg CF card in my S1, i can get several minutes of video before it's full.

go for the CF type 2 cards though, faster data transfer rate - the S1 will stop recording if it can't write to the CF card fast enough. 256 meg sandisk type 2 was about $75 at newegg when i got it a month ago.

and i love my S1. it's really a great camera. i got it for the image quality and the 10x optical zoom lens, not the video capabilities, but i've been impressed with what it can do. steadycam feature, you can zoom in and out while you record video, it will let you take 1 hour (or up to 1 gig data) before stopping if you have the memory space... the only thing i haven't tried doing is burning video to a video CD to see what the on-screen quality looks like.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:59 AM on August 24, 2004