How to Decide on a Pro High Definition Camcorder

Do you want to buy a professional HD digital camcorder? If so, this article will really help you. To begin with we will have a good look at the main features of a professional digital camcorder. We will then finish with a look at the main brands and their product ranges.

Features of a Pro High Definition Camcorder

Manual Aperture: having the ability to manually control your lens's aperture size is important. This will enable you to control the amount of light that the lens lets through into the camcorder, thus determining how light or dark the scene is.
Manual Focus: when using auto focus, you will find there will be a tendency for the lens to lose its focus as objects come and go from the scene. With manual focus, you have full control to be able to stay focussed on your intended object.
3 CCDs: your camcorder's CCD is the chip that records the image as digital information. 3 CCD chips means better quality images.
White Balance: different scenes have a different balance of colors. For instance, the light inside your house has a yellow tint, but light from the sun is more towards the blue end. With manual white balance control, you can set the color tone to your liking.
Sound Control: being able to manually control the sound recording volume is important, as some scenes will be louder or quiter than other scenes.
Headphone Jack: it is important to be able to monitor the sound via headphones, so check that the camcorder has a headphone jack.
Filter Ring: does the camcorder have a screw ring around the lens? This will enable you to add various filters, for example a polarising filter or even just a UV filter to protect the lens from scratches.
Audio Inputs: all camcorders have their own micrphones built-in, but what if you want to connect your own microphone so that you can record audio from a specific person or object?
Auto Functions: although you definitely want to be able to take control with manual settings, there may be times when you want to let automatic settings take over, so make sure your camera does have some automatic controls along with the manual controls.
Lens Adapters or Removable Lens: only the very high end camcorders have removable lenses, but some camcorders allow you to use lens adaptors to modify the existing lens to change to wide angle, telephoto, etc.

The Best Professional High Def Camcorder Manufacturers & Their Product Ranges

There aren't actually a huge number of professional camcorder brands out there, because professional camcorders are quite a specialist product.

Panasonic: $670-$6,000. A decent range of high-quality professional camcorders across a big price range.
Sony: $1,500-$5,200. As with Panasonic, a decent range spread across a large spectrum of prices.
Canon: $2,100-$10,000. A small number of very high quality professional camcorders.
JVC: $3,500-$5,400. A few very high quality high definition camcorders.

Still not certain which camcorder to buy? Why not consider High Definition Camcorders where you will find reviews of all the major high definition digital camcorders, including the Sony HDR-FX1