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Features Featured Articles Digital Convergence
Features Featured Articles Digital Convergence
Digital ConvergenceIs the “one-device-does-it-all” camera here yet? |
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Consumer
digital still cameras have long offered limited movie-shooting
capability, and some digital camcorders have provided the ability to
shoot decent-quality still images. But of late, those capabilities have
improved immensely, and today you can make good videos with many
digital still cameras, and good stills with a number of digital
camcorders.
What does it all mean to you? We’ll get to that shortly, but first let’s look at some of those improvements. Still-Camera Movies Today, all but the lowest-priced digital still cameras (and digital SLRs) provide movie capability. Resolution is up, with clearer-looking images on TV sets and bigger images on computer monitors. Quite a few of today’s digital still cameras can shoot movies at 640 x 480-pixel VGA resolution, which matches the video on any standard-definition television. The Canon PowerShot S80 digital still camera lets you shoot movies at 1024 x 768-pixel XGA resolution—closer to HD television. Frame rates are up, too. A number of current digital still cameras will shoot VGA-resolution movies at 30 fps, a big improvement over the 15 fps that was once the still-camera standard: 30 fps is comparable to what you see on television, while 15 fps looks a bit jerky. Faster frame rates not only mean smoother-looking movies on-screen, but can provide slow-motion capabilities. Several of the Canon Digital Elph models and the new Canon PowerShot S3 IS will shoot at 60 fps (at 320 x 240-pixel QVGA resolution). Panasonic’s new Lumix DMC-TZ1 and Lumix DMC-FX01 models can shoot wide-aspect VGA (848 x 480-pixel) movies at 30 fps.   |
