I'm looking for the best deal for a still/video camera that has zoom and high resolution. I'm a mac user and I'm willing to shell out at the most $1,000. What model should I buy?

-- henry frejas (henry@hleoburnett.com.ph), August 13, 1998

Answers

Unfortunately, "video" and "high resolution" really aren't compatible terms... About the best a video camera can do resolution-wise is 640x480, and even at that level, they generally aren't as sharp as the best of the VGA-level digital still cameras. Some cameras (notably the Casios) have a rapid-fire "mini-movie" mode available, in which they capture movies by clocking the CCD strangely, to get up to 16 low-res frames from a single higher-res one. (Low res in this case means ~160x120, which is *really* low). The QV-5000 will let you take movies as long as 6.4 seconds this way. Don't know if this fits your needs, but it's about as close as I can come...

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), August 20, 1998.

I have a Sony DCR-PC7 digital camcorder. Not having an A/V rated hard drive I used a Snappy to get stills from it. I've printed 8"x10"s from it, but it's really rather crappy as a stills camera. The video is awesome however. And at about US$2k also a little out of your range!

I should take delivery of a Nikon CP900 today that I hope will do the trick for stills.

It's an expensive situation of 'the right tool for the job' I'm afraid.

J.

-- Jens Ratsey-Woodroffe (jens@ratsey.com), August 21, 1998.