How to Find the Best Camcorder for Your Business

Your company will be hosting an important meeting that you want to tape for review. Or perhaps your work assignments require you to travel and record video clips onsite. If you’ve been in either of these situations or if you know that you’ll encounter them, chances are you’ll want a camcorder around to tackle the job. These tips will help you select a camcorder to meet your business needs.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Read videography magazines for reviews of the latest camcorders. These will tell you about various camcorder features, as well as the quality of those features, how useful they are and whether they are worth the price.

2. Study the camcorder’s design. A good business camcorder combines ruggedness, functionality and ease-of-use. It should be compact and easy to maneuver. Get a model with a nice, large and bright LCD screen and an easy to navigate menu system.

3. Look at the zoom functions. Aim for a fixed lens with 10x optical zoom or greater and optical image stabilization.

4. Select a camcorder with 3 1/6-inch or larger CCD sensors with a minimum of 250,000-pixel effective resolution per sensor, or 1 1/4-inch or 1/3-inch recommended with a minimum of 690,000-pixel effective resolution per sensor. CCD chips generate the image in the camera. The larger the CCD, the brighter and better the colors produced.

5. Find out what recording format the camcorder accepts. For business purposes, MiniDV and Mini DVD-R/RW/RAM are recommended.

6. Find out what sort of digital media (such as memory cards) your camcorder accepts. Does your camcorder record MPEG-1 and MPEG-4 formats for Web sites and e-mail?

7. Test different camcorders at the store and look for the video quality, the color quality and handling. Does the camcorder feel comfortable to use? Are the functions, buttons and features easy to understand?

Tips & Warnings

• Consider additional features like external microphone input (for interviews) and built-in microphones that ‘zoom’ the audio with the lens.
• Always select a camera based on its optical zoom, not its digital zoom or combined zoom. Optical zoom uses the optics of the lens to magnify an image, whereas digital zoom fits the image in the same space to give the appearance of zoom. Digital zoom comes at the expense of resolution.
• Many media cards require specialized readers. Check which kinds of readers you’ll need to transfer recordings from your camcorder to your computer.
• Make sure your computer has a FireWire jack if you intend to transfer videos via FireWire. Many camcorders come equipped with FireWire jacks, but many computers do not.