[Krusty]

Hey forums, I'm planning on purchasing the recently released Canon PowerShot A400 which claims to have 3 "movie modes": (160x120, 320x240, 640x480). Now .. while I certainly don't expect DV movie level quality, I'd love to hear from anyone who has a similar camera regarding the movie quality these things actually produce.
Questions:
Anyone have a recent model Canon with a 640x480 movie mode ?
Would you consider the 640x480 mode good enough to actually send to someone else ?
I couldn't find anything regarding the FPS of these movies. I'm assuming ~15fps ... what sort of frame rates do you actually experience ?
I'm assuming the audio will be horrible, but does the video actually look like video or or a choppy, web movie?
Can you tell me anything about what format the native movie is in (.mov ? .avi ? ) and what are the date rates (k/sec)
Anybody know of a place I could view a sample move made from one of these things ? (in 640x480 mode)


Note: I'm NOT buying this thing for movies .. just wondering if that "feature" is actually something useable of just shite. This camera was released so recently, I haven't seen any in stores yet to give it a try.

Graçias in advance

[jeffnudi]

Check out the review by Steve's Digicams at http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_...a400_pg3.html.

[MaxPower2k3]

my friend has (i think) the A75, which takes amazingly good quality movies at 640x480. I was really surprised how good they looked, considering they're coming from a digital camera.

[Krusty]

Originally posted by jeffnudi:
Check out the review by Steve's Digicams at http://www.steves-digicams.com/2004_...a400_pg3.html.

thanks .. your link was dead for some reason, but I found the main review page their. Much Appreciated. -- I'm reading it now.

Originally posted by MaxPower2k3:
my friend has (i think) the A75, which takes amazingly good quality movies at 640x480. I was really surprised how good they looked, considering they're coming from a digital camera.

Yeah, a buddy of mine had a Canon <something> that is nearly 3 years old. Only did 320x240 .. the picture quality was EXCELLENT but it was very jumpy. That's why I was wondering if things had improved .. especially with movies that are twice as tall and twice as wide (i.e. 4x the number of pixels than a 320x240).

[Krusty]

Well, the conclusion of that review was nice -- good entry level camera, has some manual adjustments that some point-and-shoots don't . Thanks for the input, guys.

Too bad the 640x480 mode looks to be a dismal 10fps. Which I guess answers my question ... it appears that this camera won't really make decent video at 640x480 .. though the lower resolutions look a bit more promising.

[edit] For anyone else who may be interested, I found a 640x480 movie sample take by the (much more expensive) A95. However, the video specs are the same -- so I'd expect similar from the A400. Tad choppy 6.4mb movie