Would anyone know the latest about digital cameras that have movie capabilities? I have a Canon S40 that does 30 seconds of low quality video, 320x240 at 15 fps with crappola sound.
The newer Canon S45/50 can do 3 minutes.

I noticed the new Fujifilm camera does 640 x 480 at 30 fps with
sound, length limited only by storage media. So, I'm guessing
that this camera can stream to, say, a 1-3 GByte microdrive.


Fujifilm FinePix S7000 Zoom - 6 mp sensor
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0307/03072902finepixs7000.asp

This camera is approaching DV format quality, although it doesn't
seem to have a microphone input or any mention of the sound format.

Gints,

Digital Still cameras usually use MPEG1 compression. Even though you are getting 640x480 @ 30fps it still is no where near the quality of miniDV. Just like miniDV video cameras don't come near the still image quality of digital still cameras.

Who knows, maybe in the future we'll get something that excells at both, but at the moment we have to settle for one or the other.

Actually, we do have something that excells at both, and it's made by samsung!

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=1051826315288&skuId=5361869&type=product&productCategoryId=cat04015

It's a 1CCD 680K pixel camcorder with 10x optical zoom, and then you flip the lens assembly around, and it's got another whole lens assembly with a 4MP still CCD with a 3x opictal zoom lens. Cool stuff.

Hi,

Actually, these cameras are doing Motion JPEG (MJPEG), which is
simply a stream of JPEG images stored with an optional audio track. 640 x 480 pixels at 30 fps *IS* a step closer to DV. Although the JPEG compression ratio is currently very high, at some point, it will be lowered. MJPEG is not as efficient as DV at the same data rate, but I wouldn't be surprised to see DV on a tapeless camera before long.

I haven't found any cameras doing MPEG1 in my searches. Some digital camera spec sheets list MPEG as a format, but for those I've inspected, it's listed as MJPEG in their manuals.

As we both realize, there doesn't have to be an innate difference
between a camcorder and digital "still" camera. With 3 GByte
MicroDrives and even faster 3+ GByte flash cards around the corner, digital "still" cameras will assume more of the camcorder
abilities.

FWIW, my brother has a digital camera that takes short movies, but I can't remember the model (Canon, I think, or Olympus). Neither After Effects nor Premiere would import the clips. I had to import into Cleaner and then export as QT/AVI first.

I'm using a Canon S40. These motion JPEG AVI files are played by the standard Windows Media Player from the desktop.

Pinnacle Studio 8 edits these movies. I generally reduce them to
500 kbps MPEG-1 files. Adobe Photoshop doesn't recognize the files. SoundForge/Vegas 4.0 seem to recognize only the audio portion of the video+audio file. What a rip ! I can't believe that these apps haven't thought about serving movies from digital cameras.

I've been editing these movies with Pinnacle Studio8.
In fact, I've authored a couple of DVDs with these low-rez movies.
The video quality is crappy, but there is something about crappy-looking video that seems to "legitimize" the footage by making them seem old. I can't say the same for the crunchy sound of the camera's internal microphone and the 11025 Hz/8bit mono audio file.