Looking for a good professional camcorder

[gazoo]

Hey there!

I am new on dvxuser. I really enjoy this place :)


anyway...

I wanna be a cinematographer and I use a lot of my time practising. I usually practice by making short movies, in small danish film clubs and film companies. I am saving money for a good professional camcorder because the one that I have now, truly sucks.

I have been looking over the Internet...specially on youtube...watching beautiful shot videos trying to figure out what camera, I am going to buy when I have the money.

I found these three camcorders:

Canon XL2
Canon XL H1
JVC GY-HD110E


I like them all three, XL2 because of it's magnificent picture quality. H1 because it's beautiful High-Definition image and the JVC GY...., because of it's extremely cool lens with focus etc. (that would cost me 1400$ to buy the 16x manual on XL2 or XL H1)

But I don't really know which one I want to go for. So I really need professional advise.

A little info:
I am only using the camcorder, for short films and music videos.
So I want a camcorder that gives the best filmlook to the footage.



:dankk2:in advance



Ziryab

[Robert M Wright]

Personally, I don't have any desire to change lenses on a camcorder, so long as the stock lens is adequate for 2 megapixel images. I'd rather not have the added issues of keeping the imagers clean.

Frankly, I doubt the value of spending thousands on putting super high quality glass in front of 1-2 megapixel (or less) imagers (not to mention the image then gets compressed considerably, inducing artifacts). It's not the same as with shooting film or with a 10 megapixel DSLR, where difference in lens quality is much more noticeable. I'd rather spend the extra money on something like an EX1 with higher quality imagers (and a tad less image compression). The difference (for the money) is much greater.

You might take a look at the XH-A1. At that price point, the image quality (same as XL-H1) is tough to beat.

[Nick Royer]

Get an HVX-200 or an HMC-150 when i comes out. They look the most like film in the price range.

[Robert M Wright]

We really don't know what the images from the HMC-150 will look like. Panasonic simply hasn't given us enough information yet. We don't know critical things, like detail about the imagers or even what the maximum bitrate of the codec will be, to even really make educated guesses as to how they will perform.

[Robbie Comeau]

Have you checked out the DVX?

[Kegan]

What a broad price range. Sounds like you need to do some more research to figure out what suits your needs best. There are quite a few posts about using a camera for short films and music videos. I wouldn't consider the XL2 anymore, simply because buying an SD camera now seems sort of foolish with the price point of the XH-A1 as Robert mentioned.

Do you REALLY need interchangeable lenses? If so, I hear absolutely fantastic things about the XL H1.

Good luck,

Kegan

[Evro]

I have the XH-A1, XL2 & JVC and all are good at what they do, however, for my line of work I favour the A1 as the best all-rounder. It has a nice 20x zoom to give you great shallow DOF with good colour rendition. But then the JVC has a proper manual lens, sits properly on your shoulder, uses a full time progressive scan square pixel CCD block and in my opinion looks more fimic than the Canons with their faux progressive mode.

You'll have to trawl through these forums and try cameras out before you can make an informed choice.

Good luck,