Are Professional Digital Camcorders worth it?

The great thing about professional digital camcorders is that you don’t have to be a professional to use them but the results you get from them can look very professional. Especially with the market being very competitive the prices of Professional Digital Camcorders have fallen.

What Is A Camcorder?

A camcorder is a portable electronic device for recording video and audio using a built-in recorder unit. Camcorders contain three major components; lens, imager, and recorder. The lens gathers and focuses light on the imager. The imager converts incident light into an electrical signal. Finally, the recorder encodes the video signal into a storable form.   Beginning in the early 1990s, recording onto digital tape became the norm. Today optical disks, hard disk drives, and solid-state memory dominate the marketplace.  

Solid-state professional digital camcorders can have either removable media in form of memory cards, or built in memory, or both. HDD-based camcorders usually have non-removable media in form of a hard disk drive. Camcorders that do not use magnetic tape are often called tape-less camcorders. Camcorders that use two different types of media, like built-in HDD and memory card are often called hybrid camcorders. 

Professional Digital Camcorder Optical Zoom

Most digital camcorders allow you to zoom in or out to change the point of view of the image. Be very cautious of digital camcorders that do not have the word optical in the sentence discussing the zoom range. If your camcorder only has a digital zoom, it is not really a zoom. An optical zoom actually allows you to change the field of view of the image, so that you can widen out for a landscape shot, or zoom in for a portrait. It does this by moving lens elements to change the focal length of the camera's lens. Some of the best optical zooms can be as much as 10-1 or 3-1 range.

Many professional digital camcorders come with a mixture of optical and digital zooms. That is alright because the digital zoom is not used until you have maxed out the optical zoom. If you really need that much zoom you might just have to walk towards the subject to make it bigger, or back away to make it smaller.

Professional Digital Camcorder Flash Cards

Many digital camcorders allow the use of the very common Compact Flash or CF card. This is a little card about half the size, and a little thicker, than a business card. It can hold up to hundreds or even thousands of images. Other memory types are Microdrives (MD), Smart Media, Secure Disk (SD), Memory Stick, or even a floppy disk, or CD.

Professional Digital Camcorder Megapixels