I want to know who has experience with digital video cameras with the still photo option. ? Can you download this pictures easily to the pc. ? How high is the resolution of the pictures ? What brand and types of digital video cameras have this option. (beside the sony and the jvc ? Where can I buy them and at what price. ? Is it possible that this kind of cameras will be tested by IR. If you have an answer on one of the above question please mail them.

Kind regards.

Conrad

-- Conrad van Pruijssen (pruyssen@xs4all.nl), November 08, 1999

Answers

Digital video cameras have totally inferior still photo capability compared with dedicated still photo digicams. The still photo capability is a nice feature for putting some 640 X 480 pics on the web. If you want to print decent size pics forget it. An exception might be the newest sony dv cam which is finally in the megapixel range, but even that one won't compare to low end digicams for stills.

Transferring pics isn't too bad, either you have firewire in your comp or you can use a card reader, most of the dvcams with still capability can take smart media or memory sticks, etc..

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), November 08, 1999.

I have the JVC GRDVL-9500 (I think thats the correct model number). Anyway, the resolution of the shots it takes is 640 * 480. The quality of these stills is very ordinary. They are equivalent to old model digital cameras, but much better than video capture devices will give you off of analog video. This camera has progressive scan, which takes many complete images very rapidly. The upside to this is that you can pick off complete images from anywhere in the video sequence. The down side is that playback in progressive mode is slightly unnatural looking. I don't like it. So I consider progressive scan to be nothing more than a very rapid stop-action capability. I have used the JLIP feature of the camera to download pictures through a serial port, but find it annoyingly slow. Jlip still-captures of the regular video segments (non-progressive scan) reveal the interleaving clearly and in my opinion are useless. The moving video quality is really nice. Love the batteries, love the small tape.

-- Brent Faul (blf9751@usl.edu), November 10, 1999.