[jonahfish7]

I recently bought a Sony TRV320 Digital 8. It works great, except I noticed the other night while recording inside my house under normal house lighting conditions that the picture was grainy. My previous camcorder a Sony TRV516 Hi8 never had problems with lowlight or normal inside light conditions. So I hooked up both camcorders to the television to view the video they produced (and eliminate the video recording media as a source of any problems). Well, I discovered that the "old" Hi8 camcorder was better at normal and low household light conditions.

I thought that the problem was with my TRV320 so I called up the camcorder reseller and Sony too. Both the reseller and Sony explained to me that the "old" Hi8 camcorders had a lux capacity of 0.4 while my current "new" digital 8 camcorder had a lux rating of 1.0. So the problem wasn't with my TRV320 but all digital camcorders.

I guess we have really advanced. We now can buy digital camcorders that get more resolution than Hi8 camcorders, but can gather less light and so therefore all those pixels on the digital video look grainy.

The solutions I have thought of are 1) to film people in better lighting conditions while inside and 2) to purchase a video light that can provide direct illumination.

What is also interesting is that you can spend $3000 on the top of the line Sony digiital camcorder and get a lux rating of 4.0. That is potentially 400 % worse than my $600 camcorder and 1000% worse than my "old" Hi8 camcorder.

[jwardell]

That's a common trait of reducing the lens and CCD size. The smaller the lens, the less light it can gather.

it has to do with the DV codec as well, it's not as high resolution as analog video (actually, the miniDV codec is not as good, the regular DV codec is twice as high, twice as expensive, and takes up twice the room.)