Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Meatwad on November 27, 2011, 11:58:21 AM
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Believe its time to purchase an HD camcorder. Have been looking online at several websites but cant really decide on what to get. One will have great customer reviews on a particular model, but a different site will have bad reviews on the exact same thing. As of right now the two best models are a Sony and Samsung.
Few of the main things are excellent recording ability in low light and be able to record at (quite) long ranges. Something that would be great to take to an airshow.
Dont want to break the bank but would really like to get one under $400, cheaper the better but not too cheap to have a POS.
Last camcorder I bought takes VHS tapes if that tells you the last time I bought one
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This may or may not be what your thinking of but take a look at the GoPro camera system. It shoots great HD video and can record for a few hours. Its also very tough. (If you happen to be clumsy like me that is definitely a plus!)
Hopefully that helps.
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Though it doesn't really fall in your price range I recently bought a Sony HDR-CX360. The video quality is just stunning. I haven't tested it in a low light situation but field of view and zoom capabilities are great. It has a pretty wide FOV when zoomed all the way out and I believe 12x optical zoom with 160x digital zoom. It also come with 32GB of internal memory and of course has a slot for a SD card. I paid about $700 for mine on sale though. Overall its a great camera.
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In my experience the sony ones have been good in low light, however their low light capability was cut back a bit after the big nekkid video scandal. It seems that their sensors were a bit too sensitive to IR so you could see vague body shapes and "hot spots" through clothing. The filters they put in the cameras to "fix" this reduced their low/no light performance though, since the IR sensitivity was reduced.
Some baby cameras and webcams have either no IR filter, or an IR filter that can be easily removed. That makes them a lot more sensitive to IR so you can see the kids sleeping better when the lights are off, at the expense of sometimes being able to see someone's underwear seams or outline of their bra when the camera is in night mode. It's only a big deal to immature troublemakers...
Still, as much as I hate sony as a company, their camcorders are pretty good. I think I have a hard-drive storage samsung or jvc camcorder right now because the price was right, but it's not HD.
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Last camcorder I bought takes VHS tapes if that tells you the last time I bought one
Oh YEAH???? Well mine takes betamax so eat that!!
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MMMM Betamax
So far I have it narrowed down to
Sony HDR-CX160
Canon VIXIA HF M400
Canon VIXIA HF M40
Samsung H300
Guess ill see what monday brings if one goes on a deep discount for cyber monday. If one does, might get it