Dell Camcorders
Does it make sense to buy a full HD or even an HD ready camcorder as against an SD camcorder?
Not just from the point of view whether one has an HD TV or not, but also from whether we can play videos recorded using HD camcorders on our desktops/laptops( on my laptop, dell latitude 620, I can’t play HD videos from youtube/dailymotion in full screen).
Can we burn such HD videos to normal DVDs or do we need HD/bluray discs? I suppose we can but there will be loss in quality.
Would this loss in quality still be better than videos recorded directly in SD using a SD camcorder? Do these HD camcorders have options to switch to SD ?
I definitely recommend HD if you can afford it. I have several HD camcorders, and I wouldn’t consider shooting much of anything in SD anymore… even when I’m targeting an SD format like DVD.
You’re very correct about PC playback… most modern PCs are running HDTV or near screen resolutions. That’s just part of it, though, because it’s popular on many HD camcorders to offer progressive, rather than interlaced, video modes, usually 1080/30p and 1080/24p (I believe, for example, all of the current Canon HD camcorders support these, as well as the orginal 1080/60i). Progressive is better on computer, better on the web, and even fine on DVD or Blu-Ray for most content. Some would argue for 1080/60i for sports and other fast motion stuff, but you have the choice, eh?
Pretty much all HD camcorders have some SD mode. All HDV (tape based) models can record in standard DV mode… I have a Sony that also offers DVCAM mode. Most AVCHD camcorders can drop to MPEG-2 SD… I have a Blu-Ray based camcorder which will drop to SD modes if you record on DVD or DVD-RAM rather than Blu-Ray. It’s pretty standard on HD models.
However, I’m unlikely to record in SD, and here’s why. When you’re targeting SD, your HD image is 6x larger than you need it, sure. But the way most digital video on consumer formats is recorded, color is subsampled… your eye isn’t as sensitive to color as to luminance (120million luma sensors, 6 million color sensors in the human retina). So a 720×480 SD video frame actually contains only 320×240 worth of color information. A full 1920×1080 frame contains 960×540 separate color samples. And the encoding of color in DV doesn’t match DVD (in NTSC, anyway), the HD formats generally do. So while downsampling to DVD resolutions will certainly cut your resolution, the resulting image can look better than a native SD image.
There are other factors, too… your downscaling algorithms can be more sophisticated in dealing with pixel aliasing, so the image may look sharper, even if it’s not (it’s a similar concept to oversampling for audio recording.. which is one reason many SD-only camcorders have megapixel sensors these days).
Here’s another thing.. last fall, my Mom was performing in a show that I couldn’t attend. I lent her an HD camcorder and a tripod, and they shot the show, but with very little camera action. While this was shot in HD, there was only DVD needed (most little old ladies don’t have Blu-Ray players, I guess). So, thanks to the higher resolution, I could do cropping and panning in the editor, which resulted in a much better looking video than an SD version would have been.
I often do several “prints” of the same final video: DVD, Web, and occasionally Blu-Ray. These days, you can put 720p videos up on YouTube… not “full” HD, but you can downsize for something that’s still higher resolution than SD, and can actually look decent online.
Sony Handycam HDR-XR150 Unboxing
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