Excellent small cam and solid state camcorder

We just had a baby and wanted a dual-role camera...one small enough to take everywhere for good quality shots, and ideally something that could also take short video clips with sound.

I made a huge mistake in assuming that the best choice would be some kinda of camcorder that also took digital stills. I tried out a bunch of panasonic and jvc products ranging from $140 to $900 . They all suffered from at least one of two maladies. One was really, really lousy video quality (and my expectations on the cheaper units was VERY low); basically if the product uses MPEG-4 video compression to allow for longer movies, the video quality even on the highest settings will be of acceptable quality to a small child. Muddy, fuzzy, jerky...just plain bad. Some more expensive cameras use MPEG-2, which doesnt lose as much quality but takes a lot more space. Those were bigger, way more expensive, and in some cases required tiny hard disks - microdrives - to store all the info. Thats what creates a lot of the expense. None of them did a good job in lower light situations, which frankly 90% of my videos are shot in ...indoors with a light or two on in the room.

After thoroughly frustrating myself, I happened to think about having taken some really bad short choppy video clips (without sound) with an older digital still camera. I snapped up my more recent olympus D-395, a decent and at this time very inexpensive basic 3 megapixel camera. Lo and behold, it took a very credible, smooth and well rendered video clip in low light. No sound unfortunately, as the camera doesnt support that. And in quicktime format...small and of decent quality but unusable from an editing perspective unless you own a Mac (I dont anymore) or want to buy quicktime software (which I dont).

Which brings us to the second problem of many of these cameras...video format. Almost every single one of the solid state camcorders for some reason put some spin on the MPEG-4 or MPEG-2 format that made the file format directly unusable unless you used the provided cameras software to import and convert the data. A huge shame because all of these devices appear to be a disk drive to your average windows PC. I went through an entire afternoon trying to figure out why the video wouldnt work on one camera when imported, but played back directly on the unit it was fine.

I suppose its that during development they hit some glitch or brick wall inside the camera and decided to "fix it in software during the import".

All well and good if you want to install, learn and use some piece of crippleware or really junky software just to copy a file into your system. I used several of these...I didnt find any of them easy to use or intuitive in the least.

Another offshoot of this little format diversity and problems is what you can do with the clips afterwards. If they're in mpeg2/4 format, you need to have some considerable expertise and be prepared to perform wizardry, cobble together multiple pieces of shareware, and/or buy software, codecs, etc to work with them.

Guess what, also a bunch of stuff I didnt really want to do.

My old camcorder functionally worked the way I wanted to do this: I shot the video, plugged it into the computer, windows movie maker (free with XP) came up, imported the video, let me edit it, put in fades and transitions, and then convert the video to a broad range of size/quality tradeoffs that any windows machine could play.

Unfortunately the camcorder was big and bulky. Despite buying at least 32,500 blank tapes I could never find one when I wanted to shoot something, and since I imported everything into the PC and watched from there either on the monitor or through the tv out to our projector...all those tapes were really unnecessary.

Ok, so now I know what I probably wanted... a small digital camera that takes good photos and also takes movies with sound that arent in mpeg2/4 or use some proprietary weirdo conversion software just to watch the movies on a PC.

I was surprised to find a good range of these, and settled down quickly to the Sony DSC-T1 and the Canon SD300. I read a TON of reviews on many cameras and was surprised to find a lot of very unhappy people with cameras that took bad pictures, had some weird and well known quirk, or equally well known bugs. One camera was well known for randomly (usually on the first day of an exotic vacation), giving an "error #xx" message on powerup and refusing to work until returned to the manufacturer. No thanks. Apparently the gods of "make bad products and release them for sale anyways" are very alive and well in the compact digital camera world.

After further research, I found a compelling and overwhelming amount of reviews praising the SD300 and being not so happy with the still photo portion of the DSC-T1.

Given the SD300 is cheaper, and uses a more standard Secure Digital memory card rather than the expensive and proprietary Sony Memory Stick, I got the SD300.

I am SO glad I did. Beautiful photos. Slick video even in near darkness. No red-eye problems. No blurry shots. No long waits for the camera to start up or store shots.

Coupled with a Kingmax super high speed 1GB secure digital card I got for about $85 from Newegg (a huge bargain), I can get 500 superfine shots, almost 1000 fine shots, and/or up to 9 minutes of AVI format video. You NEED a high speed flash chip for these video devices, or you'll have problems shooting long video clips. This kingmax is a little thinner than other SD chips, and lacks the "protection" sleeve that lets you prevent accidental erasure, but its fast, reliable, dirt cheap, and works great in this camera.

Nine minutes isnt a lot, but for the most part it will more than satisfy our requirements for "Oh look what the baby's doing", followed by a 3 second startup to film gap, and a minute or two of video. Catching a few clips of this and that are also just fine. When 2GB chips fall below $100 I'll get one of those and we'll get 18 minutes plus another 9 from the 'spare chip'.

The battery on this is rechargeable, which makes me happy. Owning a digital camera and just buying a ton of baby stuff that all require an endless stream of AA, C and D cell batteries was getting on my nerves.

The camera operation is pathetically simple. I havent even torn the shrink-wrap off the manual and I've taken photos, videos, done some minor video editing right in the camera (it lets you cut out parts of a video you dont want), hooked the camera up to a tv to replay still shots and video, and connected it to the PC and uploaded stills and video.

And heres the good part of that skimpy 9 minute video time. The format is good old AVI, which means the files are huge to start with, but almost ANY video software imports it...windows movie maker, any dvd package, any shareware video file format converter. I can quickly import and edit, cut dvd's, shrink and change formats to windows media, quicktime, or mpeg2/4 with ease using software that came with my PC and dvd burner. I can go as simple or as slick as I want to. No crippleware, no camera software needed, nada.

So if you want a tiny go-anywhere camera that can grab a quick few minutes of video here and there, easy to use, and easy to handle the media on the back end, this is the one.

Small update:

Had this for about a month and still love it. No problems with "red eye" as some reviewers have complained about. Have shot photos of baby, cats, dogs, people, places...all GREAT looking. After the in-law grandparents saw a side-by-side of the shots this produced next to shots their basic 35mm camera took of the same events, they had us get them a computer, printer and the camera. I think that says it all.

Battery life is great. We havent and probably wont do the "take 300-500 shots in one day" thing...we take 10-20 shots a day, a few minutes of video every few days. After 2 weeks it occurred to me that I hadnt recharged the battery. The original charge took (roughly) an hour or so. I plugged it in and forgot about it for a while. This first recharge took about 15 minutes, so it probably wasnt more than a quarter discharged. I just plugged it in again yesterday for its second recharge after another 2 weeks, took about 10 minutes. I've gone through another dozen D and C cell batteries in baby toys in the same month...I like this!

Lastly, I am amazed. Nothing short of amazed. I finally tore into the Canon software included, one package for stills and one for video. Its actually good and useful software that isnt crippled or worthless. Besides the usual editing and authoring stuff, the movie package lets you convert any on-disk video from any format you have a codec for into any other format. I was finally able to convert some of my wifes old quicktime movies from her old camera/mac to mpeg2 and WMA. I was about to buckle and pay $30 for a piece of software to do this one feature alone. The included stills software was also pretty decent...you can set up where you want the shots to go and a naming convention, hook up the camera to the USB cable and push a button on the camera to upload all the shots to where you want them to go. My wife the "browser and email" type user uploaded a full set of shots, sorted through them, printed out 20 she liked and had a photo album filled for her purse to show to people...in about an hour while I was at the store and with no help.

Second update:

The good: still like this camera a lot, have had no problems, infrequently need to charge the battery, good results with no major glitches.

The bad: I'm disappointed in one aspect - the transfer speed. The box and manual loudly proclaim "USB 2.0". After getting tired of waiting for a gigabyte of photos and movies to download to the machine I bought a USB 2.0 card, installed it in my computer, hooked it up to the camera...and its no faster. On further analysis, the "USB 2.0!" claims have small print that says "USB 1.1 speed".

Ok...thats NOT usb2.0. Thats USB 1.1. I think the "USB 2.0!" is a bad claim. I wasted $20 on a USB 2.0 card and a half an hour installing it. And theres NO excuse for a modern camera to come equipped with only a USB 1.1 port.

I guess now I'll have to go get a Secure Digital memory card reader and remove the memory card every time I want to upload a lot of data. Disappointing because I found a very inexpensive 1GB high speed card that had one drawback...its very thin and flimsy, but I figured "What the heck...I wont be taking it out and putting it back in very often"...