Viewcam selection

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I am looking for a Digital viewcam that has a built-in analog to digital conversion.

Q1. What types of digital format after conversion ? Are they compatile to Mpeg-1 standard and accepted by Nero burner ?

Q2. What is the most recommended brand and model in the market that a Viewcam can perform photo (jpg format) at 300 to 400K pixels, digital recording and at least 22X lens zoom ? My budget is about US$700.

Thanks

-- SY CHAI (sy.chai@plexus.com), August 03, 2002

Answers

1. With the exception of two, digital camcorders are of two physical formats: DV and Digital8 (D8). Both use DV compression, which is a linear compression scheme 5:1 that has a bitrate of about 25mb/s, and can be made to conform to type-1 or -2, the latter Video for Windows/DirectShow specs so can be used as AVI files directly. Most models can accept analogue inputs and convert it to DV and record, while also alternatively providing DV AVI at the FireWire connector output. DV AVI IS NOT MPEG, and you have to encode it separately to get MPEG-1/2. One format that does record exclusively to MPEG-2 is the new Sony Micro MV, but whether the MPEG-2 it produces is DVD compliant I don't know. The other model left is Hitachi's DVD media camcorder that also creates MPEG-2 with the same caveat as the latter. There are digital still cameras that are sophisticated enough to capture 320x240 MPEG-1 for a few seconds but that is NOT VCD- compliant. It can probably be accepted by Nero and re-encoded to VCD- compliant MPEG. But why stoop down to that? 2. Some upscale camcorder models have more than 1 megapixels in their CCD and so can double as still cameras; you know which ones these are because they will have memory cards with which to store the snapshots in, as well as USB connectivity for uploading the pictures to your PC.

-- Mehmet Tekdemir (turk690@yahoo.com), August 04, 2002.

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