Guys, what is the difference between high end didigtal camers vs high end didital camcoders?

[AirForceElite]

Guys, hello
I always wondered:

Why do people buy expensive digtal cameras for liek $2000 when they can just get a professional cam coder for the same price and do more with it...

a camcoder can be used to take pictures right?...
so why do people spend fortunes buying esxpensive digital cameras?

thanks for your help

 

[Penth]

What's the difference between a Toyota Tundra and a Honda Civic? Sure, they can be used for similar purposes, but a highend digital camera takes VERY high quality pictures, and not very good video, whereas a high end digital camcorder takes VERY high quality video, but picture quality has much to be desired.

 

[AirForceElite]

Originally posted by: Penth
What's the difference between a Toyota Tundra and a Honda Civic? Sure, they can be used for similar purposes, but a highend digital camera takes VERY high quality pictures, and not very good video, whereas a high end digital camcorder takes VERY high quality video, but picture quality has much to be desired.

that makes sence
but i still wonder though:

a good digital camcoder can shoot around 24 frames per second...
now if you just record someone for 10 seconds, you would have 240 frames of that person...

dont you guys think that there gotta be at least 1 awesome picture out of all those 240?
thats why i thought that camcoder is better than camera...

also, Penth, is it me or do all digital camers need like 10 seconds to take ana dditional picture?

My friend has one with LCD display and when he takes a pic it takes him like 10 seconds before the camera is ready again...
thanks for your time

 

[DaveSimmons]

The camcorder takes 240 low-resolution pictures that look OK on a TV but would be blocky and bad if you tried to make a print.

The lens, shutter, sensor designs are just different for the two types of device, and if you optimize them for one kind of recording (still, video) they get worse for the other.

Someone (JVC? Sony?) is now making a dual device that has 2 sensors in it, one for video one for stills, but it costs more than 2 separate devices of similar quality.

 

[AirForceElite]

just out of curiousity...
why does my friend's sony camera..he bought it for $600 i think maybe 2-3 month ago take pics so slow?
it takes him literally 10 secondsbefore he can take another..

it works like this:
he takes a pic...then it takes around 7 seconds for it to appear on LCD..then another 2-3 seconds before the camera is ready for the next picture...

do all digital camera so that or he bought a bad one (he is rich, but has absolutely no idea about technology....he just buys whatever the sales people tell him)
so could it be that they gave him an old model or something or all digital camers need that much time to take the next picture?

 

[dawks]

Originally posted by: AirForceElite
just out of curiousity...
why does my friend's sony camera..he bought it for $600 i think maybe 2-3 month ago take pics so slow?
it takes him literally 10 secondsbefore he can take another..

it works like this:
he takes a pic...then it takes around 7 seconds for it to appear on LCD..then another 2-3 seconds before the camera is ready for the next picture...

do all digital camera so that or he bought a bad one (he is rich, but has absolutely no idea about technology....he just buys whatever the sales people tell him)
so could it be that they gave him an old model or something or all digital camers need that much time to take the next picture?

You can change the time the picture is displayed on the LCD. My Canon A40 (a cheap camera) can have it set to 2 seconds or 10 seconds. As far as your friends Sony taking three seconds before being able to shoot again, that sounds like operator error, or a faulty camera. It should not take that long.

For the DV Camera vs. Digital Still camera issue. Digital Video (DV) Cameras shoot at like 320x240 I think.. Maybe a little higher like 640x480. HD Cameras are even higher still, but not as high as a 2megapixel camera (again I think). Where as 2megapixel cameras shoot at 1600x1200. Digital Still cameras collect much more data in for a single frame then a DV Camera does. Also note DV cameras are tuned for motion capture, where as still cameras are tuned to still images. This point in itself makes for a huge difference.

Ask yourself why do digital cameras suck at shooting video? 5megapixel digital still cameras only shoot 640x480 video, and even then its still not very good quality, and no where near a good DV camera.

Also note, the optics. Digital cameras for the most part, only ship with 3x optical zooms (some higher end and very expensive ones might have up to 10x zoom - and you can buy custom lenses with higher zooms too). While on the other side of things, DV Cameras have 100x zoom's. The optics on those cameras dont have to be as precise because the images they are capturing are not as high quality.

I hope most of this info is relativly accurate. Im not an expert, but I do have a slight grasp of the info.

 

[AirForceElite]

dawks thank you
that cleared up even more things

the most important thing i know now is that they have different resolutions
thank you

 

[JonTom]

RE: the time to take pictures.

Check to make sure the camera isn't taking the pics in RAW or TIFF formats. This can slow things down. JPG is enough for most applications, esp if your friend doesn't know what he's doing.