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Digital Video Cameras

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For anyone who likes to take video images with a camcorder (DV camera), this type of camera would work well for you. You can easily hook it up to your PC and have it streaming to the Web. The one aspect to digital video is the editing it can do. Digital video cameras can shoot images at 30 frames a second. This means a typical video session can capture up to 1800 images in a minute. The only drawback to video is the resolution is not as good and regular digital cameras. An example of this type of camera would be the Sony DCR-TRV33 MiniDV Handycam Camcorder.

There are things to consider when purchasing a DV camera:

• PC power: Your PC has to be of sufficient power to handle the load. And your PC needs the memory to hold the images that are created by the camera. Also the quality of the images has to be preserved without any degradation. The best type of PC that has handled these cameras was the Pentium III and IV. These processors have enough power to process video images and deal with video transfers, and more.
• Connection speed: Plus, you have to think about how you are going to transmit the images to your PC. Are you going by way of USB? A couple of years ago USB 1.1 could not handle what DV cameras produced. After all, DV cameras produced up to 25 frames a second of images, with each frame about 640x480 resolutions. At that time USB 1.1 could only transfer data at nearly 1.5MB per second. In order to transfer DV camera images, the speed had to be 3.6MB. So USB 1.1 was out. So FireWire was used. It could transfer images at the speed of up to 50MB per second. However, USB came out with 2.0 which increased their speed to 60MB per second. So now USB 2.0 is used.
• Storage medium: There were three types of ways to store images as they were captured: tape-based, HD-based, and disc-based.
o Tape-based – In the mid-1990s a mini-DV cassette was made. It was about the size of an audio cassette and about half the size. The tapes held about 90 minutes of information.
o HD-based – High Definition (HD) video has been of interest to some folks. You can display images on a large screen. But because there is no standard set for the format of HD, not too many models have been made. The cheapest one is $7000.
o Disc-based – Discs are the most common one unless you find one with a card in it. These discs are re-writable so you can use them over again. However, most DV cameras made today come with CompactFlash cards that have up to 4GB of space. These cards can hold hours of video.

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