Video camera chatter

I thought I'd take a moment to talk about the camera I use to take videos. I have a Sony DCR-TRV25 digital video camera. It uses mini-DV format tapes for recording video and also has a 1 megabyte digital camera built in. It's a good multipurpose camera.



It has a 10X optical Carl Zeiss lens, which is pretty good quality in my books. It can do up to 120X zoom with digital zoom, but I have that turned off. Digital zoom is just dumb - you lose a lot of quality.

It has a 2.5" flip-out LCD screen, which is big enough to review what you've recorded. I especially like that it does not have a touchscreen. All the buttons are on the camera so my fat fingers can hit the right ones easily.

I have been playing with night video using the "Night Shot" mode and so far I like it. It has a "Super Night Shot" mode but it is not suitable for moving objects. It blurs everything.

The built-in 1 megapixel still camera is OK for quick shots, but the quality is not nearly high enough. It's good enough for small web thumbnails up to 500 pixels but not much more.

I see they're selling used on eBay for a few hundred dollars.

What do you use for video? Leave a comment!