Want advice on a new still camera with video recording

[optiplexfx]

Hi,
I am kind of new to this area and looking for a new digital camera. I want a good digital camera with decent video recoding capabilities. I came across many good digital cameras as well as good video cameras but nothing which does both with a decent level of quality. I don’t mind compromising a little in the still imaging side like getting a 4 or even a 3 MP camera if it has respectable video recording capabilities with jitter correction and a moderate resolution like 640x480. My budget is in the range of $600 (That’s all I can afford right now). Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[trog100]

dunno.. i think u either have a video camera that takes mediocre still pics.. or a still camera that takes mediocre video... they are designed to do different things.. consider the ability to do both a bonus.. the bonus of course being of poor quality and just tagged on to the cameras main purpose as sales feature..

the current trend for the mediocre video capabliities of the average still camera is to be getting a little better.. but its still not up to much compared with a "real" video camera.. i think u are looking for something that dosnt exist to be honest..

trog100

[optiplexfx]

I was afraid of that. Anyways so far the best still camera I found having decent video recording capabilities in my price range is the Olympus C-770 Movie / Ultra which is a 4MP camera with 10x optical zoom and has MPEG4 video recording support which is lets you capture close to 30 mins of video on a 256mb memory card at 640x480 resolution which I think is quite good.

[mikishots]

One of my co-workers uses a Fujifilm S-5000, and he was showing me some mountain-biking footage he had taken during a weekend outing.

I must say it was a lot better than I was expecting. Transferred to the computer, it made a very manageable video we could watch. 640 x 480, but it had decent sound and was fairly smooth.

As previously mentioned, neither the still or video camera does both well. Just like cars - hard to find a Ferrari that gets 40 mpg (o.k., not the best analogy, but it's late, and I'm laughing).