Back when I was a lad, I made productions at our local cable access channel and worked for our school district’s cable channel. This invariably meant that I was the go-to 15 year old for knowledge about video cameras. This was somewhat annoying as I was also the go-to 15 year old for knowledge about computers too. Basically I was a walking AV-pedia, which was never good for scoring popularity points with the ladies.

Of course times change. Since most of my video work now involves making a monkey move one frame at a time I haven’t really needed a consumer video camera in a while, and my knowledge has gotten pretty rusty. So it was quite a shock when my sister called me asking about what video camera I would recommend for video taping the birth of her first child.

Cathy: “We’re thinking about maybe going with a hard drive one. We don’t think we need to pay for HD”
Me: “Wait – they put hard drives in video cameras now?”

Eight years from film school and I have to talk to the blue shirts. Tragic if you think about it.

This Friday I am leaving for Ecuador – two weeks of not posting! All my fan will be pissed! – and I want to bring some sort of image capture device down with me. I really don’t have a consumer camera of any sort as I don’t take that many personal pictures, and the ones I do I usually just take with my cell phone. Ecuador has a pretty high crime rate, and I don’t want to take anything too valuable or with personal information, so I started looking for some sort of low cost camera that I could bring with me. And thats when I discovered the wonderful new world of HD SD card recording. The idea that you could buy a HD camera for less than $200 was startling, and honestly made me a bit skeptical. Is it a real camera or a crazy toy like the PLX-2000? How could you buy $200 HD camera when most name brands are twice that? The price point and the form factor were right, so I decided to take the plunge.

(Click for sample 1080p output)

I bought the Aiptek A-HD+. It is a 1080p HD camera, and with a 4 GB card you get about 60 minutes of 1080p video. It is fully automatic, and most of the options are easily accessible. It’s a one chip sensor, and if you actually look at the 1080p image on an HDTV, the image will be grainy in anything but perfect conditions. If you are shooting for DVD or web video like me, the down converted image looks rather sharp unless you’re in video’s traditionally nemesis – low light. The brightness to contrast ratio is not spectacular so if you’re shooting outdoors you can easily have dark shadows or blown out skies. In retrospect, I wish I had spent the extra $20 for a camera with optical zoom; the A-HD+ is digital zoom only. One thing worth mentioning is that you can also record in 720p at 60 FPS – an overcranked video camera!

It’s a small form factor (about Zune sized) camcorder. I know cameras have gotten small since tube cameras, but this thing could pass for a cell phone when it’s closed. The industrial design is well done but the materials chosen leave something to be desired; It definitely feels cheap, which isn’t reassuring. The flip side is that the camera is very lightweight and could fit into a jacket pocket. Leave the camera bag at home!

I knew going in that sound was not the forte of the A-HD+ and after purchasing one I now know why: they put the microphone above the lens looking up. This seems like a poor choice, as it’s an cheap omni-directional mic and all the audio sounds mungy. Even worse is that you can’t plug in an external mic to go along with capturing. I don’t mind this as most environments I will be shooting in the image will be far more important than the audio, but still, ew.

I shot a test video around the Kansas river. All of the video is saved as Quicktime files. To import the footage I just plugged it into the USB port of my Mac, loaded up iMovie, and imported the footage. If you’re using a PC Quicktime may not be your format of choice, but for a Mac user it couldn’t be easier. (Note – video below has been down-converted to 320×240)

Would I use this camera professionally? The lens is fixed in wide angle and the audio is terrible, which are serious negatives. Because of the one-sized lens and the auto adjusting aperture I can’t use it for animation. However, I can see some projects where I would break this bad boy out. At $200 this thing is basically disposable, which makes it a great stunt camera. Mount it to a car and speed along or drop it off a building; as long as the SD card survives you’ve got what you wanted. Also, for documentaries of a large event you could buy a couple of these and send camera people into a crowd. They are so small they don’t draw much attention, making more natural film making possible. Finally, I could see wonderful things happening with 10 of these cameras, a Mac, and a elementary school class. It’s like a junior filmmakers dream.So if you want this to capture your precious memories or your first child, you may want to spring the extra cash for a higher end camera. I on the other hand want a HD camera I can take places where the camera may be in peril – swim meets, triathlons, vacations, etc – and for that this camera delivers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 1:46 am and is filed under Life, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.