Advice for camera with Movie mode Auto Focus and Tele Zoom Options

Hello,

I am looking for a digital camera that can do good in pictures and
movie recording, thus removing the need for my family to carry both
camera and a camcorder all the time.

Features I am looking for include movie recording of 640 x 480 (or
more), Auto Focus and allowed Tele Zoom of minimal 3x (not digital
zoom) during movie recording. It would be great if camera is compact
size or smaller.

I found canon A720 seem to do that, but further digging told me
that some expert review it wrongly -- it cannot tele zoom, and cannot
do Auto Focus during movie recording. The other camera I am looking at
is Canon TX1, seem very impressive. It just surprises me that with the
advances in technology today, I still cannot find a simple digital
camera that can do well in both pictures and movie.

I would appreciate your advices about the selections of camera out
there that fit my criteria above.

Thanks again
Sean

Moderator wrote:

I would appreciate your advices about the selections of camera out
there that fit my criteria above.

I think that you should look at the Sanyo VPC-HD2 or HD1000 or HD700.

You really need to look for digital camcorders with decent still
capability, rather than digital cameras with decent video capability.

Be sure that whatever you buy records in MPEG4, and can use the SDHC
cards. This will narrow down your choices significantly.

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 09:19:50 -0800 (PST), Moderator
wrote:

Hello,

I am looking for a digital camera that can do good in pictures and
movie recording, thus removing the need for my family to carry both
camera and a camcorder all the time.

Features I am looking for include movie recording of 640 x 480 (or
more), Auto Focus and allowed Tele Zoom of minimal 3x (not digital
zoom) during movie recording. It would be great if camera is compact
size or smaller.

I found canon A720 seem to do that, but further digging told me
that some expert review it wrongly -- it cannot tele zoom, and cannot
do Auto Focus during movie recording. The other camera I am looking at
is Canon TX1, seem very impressive. It just surprises me that with the
advances in technology today, I still cannot find a simple digital
camera that can do well in both pictures and movie.

I would appreciate your advices about the selections of camera out
there that fit my criteria above.

Thanks again
Sean



Get a Canon S3 IS, 12x optical zoom, allows full use of zoom
during movie mode, CD quality stereo audio recording, ultrasonic
motors for noisefree zooming during video, auto focuses during
video, with EV compensation override if you don't like its
auto-expsure during move mode. 640x480 fps.

Then install the CHDK add-on for it and it gives you up to 2 gig
filesize per video and 108 new compression levels to choose from.
You can fit up to 12 hours of (low quality) video on an 8gig SD
card.

In article ,
harvey_andersen wrote:

Get a Canon S3 IS, 12x optical zoom, allows full use of zoom
during movie mode, CD quality stereo audio recording, ultrasonic
motors for noisefree zooming during video, auto focuses during
video, with EV compensation override if you don't like its
auto-expsure during move mode. 640x480 fps.

My drummer has an S3 and says the movies are great. My girlfriend has
an S2, and the movies are quite impressive.