Making Digital Movies with Digital Still Cameras

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Aug 28, 2003

We recently returned from a trip on which we took many hundreds of digital images with our trusty Minolta DiMAGE X, a very small, suit-pocket-sized camera. This camera provides a modest 2 Megapixels which is perfectly suitable for images where the target is classroom visual aids, the Web, e-mail, or up to 8 by 10 inch prints. Because the camera is so small, we have it with us all the time. Our digital camcorders are much larger, so they are with us only when we expect to need them and are willing to tote them. We frequently miss taking videos of that we would like our students to see.

We know that most digital still cameras can take short clips of video, often with audio. However, even in a relatively good camera like ours, each video clip has been limited to at most 30 seconds. The limiting factor is the size of the camera's fast buffer RAM rather than the size of the camera's much larger Flash RAM storage. In our case, we can take only about 10 MB of video even though we have a 128 MB SD card. After we give the camera a minute or so to dump its buffer into its Flash RAM, we can take another 30 seconds or so of video.

Imagine our excitement when we read an article advertising a digital still camera that could take a single movie clip until its Flash Ram was filled up. Panasonic's e-wear digital camera, which takes stills and videos and also plays a mp3 audio, is such a device. See http://www.panasonic.com/consumer_electr... Fortunately for us, our trip was to California where there were many stores at which our hopes of actually being able to see this camera could be met.

We did find it, its revised version, and also a couple of other digital still cameras (by Sony and Canon) that would take video clips that are not restricted by a small buffer RAM. In a typical row of dozens of digital still cameras, all but a couple had signs saying that they could take video.

However, the enthusiasm of sales people for this function was non-existent. They claimed the video was nowhere near as good as DV or even 8 mm analog video. We could only agree. They said that if you had trouble sending images, you would have much more sending video, which is obvious. But we think these people missed the good points.

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