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General discussion

Digicams that take great video

Oct 31, 2005 2:17AM PST

I would like to know which digital cameras take the best video. Sony had the M1 but it seems like the other manufacturers have caught up. It looks like most of them take videos at 640 X 480 for as long as you have memory space. All the new Canon Powershots look like you are taking video from a video camera which I was very impressed with. Does anyone have any suggestions of makes and models that I should be aware about, perhaps some that have stereo sound?

Seibo

Discussion is locked

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Great Video
Oct 31, 2005 5:00AM PST

The only digital camera that I know of with video stereo is the Canon S2 IS.

It also produces the best video that I have seen for a digital camera.

You can download a sample video file from the S2 IS by going to:

http://www.steves-digicams.com/2005_reviews/s2is_samples.html

Scroll down the page and find the photo of a dog.
That is an AVI file.
It is quite large (10Meg).

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powershot 620 takes good video too
Oct 31, 2005 6:17AM PST

i have tried my a 620 to take some indoor video and low light video (which my 3 ccd panasonic dont do a good job ), and i was pretty impressed only problem is that it takes up lot of memory . 1 gb of sd card will give approx 8 min thats all!!!.

the camera even has an inbuilt video editting software,and some not much different video types like vivid green and so on .
too save memory it has low resolution videos too.

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canon's?
Oct 31, 2005 6:20AM PST

do all the canon's take nice videos like the S2? I noticed on the website that you sent me that although they have the same specs (640 X 480 @ 30 fps) the S2 looked alot better than the sd550's movies even though they have the same specs (less choppy, smoother motion)

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please reply
Nov 1, 2005 3:10AM PST

I'm about to purchase the Canon IS S2, I haven't found any other camera that has video as good as the S2. Even the other Canons look like there are more artifacts and distortion even though they are newer models per se. Any additional comments before I take the plunge? Thanks everyone. The clips on Steves Digicam reviews helped a lot

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Canon S2 IS
Nov 1, 2005 6:35AM PST

A specification for 640x480 at 30 fps does not tell the whole story:

How much compression are they using?

Notice that the S2 IS also uses more memory for its videos.
i.e. Less compression.

Do they have image stabilization?
S2 IS has image stabilzation.

Zoom while using video.
This is a problem for most cameras, because the microphone will pick-up the zoom and focus motors.
Some cameras will not let you zoom with video.
Some cameras will give you the choice of zooming but warn you that you will get audio noise from the zoom motor or focus motor.
Not a problem on the S2 IS.

So far, the S2 IS does the best job of video on a digital camera.

Having said that.........a digital camcorder can do a better job, and the cost of tape is much lower than the cost of memory cards.

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thanks
Nov 1, 2005 7:08AM PST

Thanks for the reply, that makes a lot of sense. I didn't notice that the compression was more on the other Canon models (SD 550 and A620) but you can definitely see pixelation in their videos versus the video coming from the S2. Do you know if video editing (ie iMovie) software accepts the file format that these videos are in? Do you recommend any other cameras that I should consider or do you think the S2 is best choice?

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Video
Nov 1, 2005 7:20AM PST

I don't know anything about iMovie but the Canon S2 IS uses AVI which is pretty common.

Movies: AVI (Image data: Motion JPEG)

I don't know of any digital camera that does a better job on video than the S2 IS.

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Sanyo C5
Nov 2, 2005 4:08AM PST

Has anyone tried one of these? They take videos similar in quality to the S2 but use mpeg4 compression to get 45 min of video out of 1 GB versus 7 minutes in the S2. Any thoughts on the quality of this device?