[digiology]

Hi, I was thinking of buying a DV camera for about $450 that I saw online, and it says that you can take still images with it. Can these imported through the firewire cable and used in image editing applications? Is the resolution abd quality any good? I was thinking of this because it might save me having to buy a digital camera for the mean time, I only need a picture quality of about 1.3MP, so would it do the trick? What features should I look for when buying a DV camera?

[fishguy]

I purchased a Canon Optura 100 MC a few months ago for about $1400. My primary needs were not still pics, but the 1+ MP stills were an added bonus. I have played around a little with taking stills to see what the camera is capable of, but i bought it for video.

First, if your primary need is still images, don't get a DV cam. They are geared towards video and stills are purely ancilary. If, say, you plan on using the cam for more than 50% of the time taking stills, why not invest in a still cam that will give you the results you need/want and are easier to use?

Second, with that said, if your primary interest is video but you need some stills, than todays DV cams will suffice if your expectations or quality needs are not too high. I have used some of my stills for web pics such as selling items on ebay, or to send images to family via e-mail. My camera works just fine for these uses. I won't try printing though.

Finally, While you can manipulate these images in photo editing software, again don't expect to turn a beast into a beauty. Photoshop cannot perform miracles. However, some basic tweaking such as brightness/contrast as well as cropping can help turn a bad image into something usefull.

So decide what you want, video or still images and purchase accordingly. There are no cameras that excell at both.

Some features to look at on a DV cam to help with stills are non-interleaved frames (I don't have) and the use of flash cards to store stills instead of on the cassette. (Mine uses MMC cards)

Hope this helps!

[Stud Beefpile]

Hi,
I bought nearly the same DV cam here in germany it's called canon MV4i, but without MMC card. To get still images is a nice bonus, if you need these images only for watching on TV or on the computermonitor. Most DV cams have about 800.000 pixel, so the quality of the image is not the best. BTW, you can tranfer them with the normal firewire cable to your mac, but as mentioned, the quality is only a bit better than the DV stream.

Cheers
beefpile

[OwlBoy]

Well, if it records the "Images" to the tape, all it does is freeze the current frame and record it on the camera for 5 secs or so. It don't offer really good quality. Its a deinterlaced video frame... and unless the camera is really really good It won't look good.

Though, if the images are stored on a Memory stick or some other media, it wont de the deinterlaced frame thing. The results will most likly be better, though I don't know for sure. (I could be wrong, but this seems logical)

-Owl

[skalie]

Originally posted by OwlBoy:
Well, if it records the "Images" to the tape, all it does is freeze the current frame and record it on the camera for 5 secs or so.

I got suckered with that one, taking "snapshots" while filming dv.

All it did was leave random images on my tape archieves, none of which seemed to be of any better quality than I would get taking a capture of a normal filmed frame.

(I can't remember how I was doing the still frame captures, I may have been doing "print screens")

Digiology, what you are suggesting is exactly what I did, used a dv camera while waiting for the prices of digicams to come down, I recommend it. The resolution will probably only be 800,000 pixels, but the one I got has a optical zoom of 10x, which made up in some way for the lack of pixelage.

If you can afford to get a dv with dv-in I would go for it, it gives you the opportunity to edit your tapes (assuming it uses tapes) and then save them for prosperity in digital format. One 60 min minidv tape stores about 12 gigs memory wise of film.