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10.2: Digital Video Cameras

  • Page ID
    306538
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    Those grainy home videos you watched as a child are long gone. Digital cameras have done to video what CDs did to old record albums. By storing video as digital bits on a mini-DV tape, compact and portable cameras are able to collect and store much more data than analog tape, greatly improving the quality and making editing a breeze.

    Digital cameras can be separated into two types: 1 CCD and 3 CCD (CCD = charge coupled device). These measures tell you whether the camera has one computer chip or three computer chips. Cameras use these chips to process color and, as you might suspect, having three is better than one. As a result, 3 CCD cameras produce much higher quality video but are also more expensive. A 3 CCD camera costs $1,500-$5,000 while a 1 CCD camera can be had for less than $1,000.

    clipboard_e4bd81008ef9b39764fbb0b6686855eed.png

    An example of a 3CCD camera, the Canon GL-2.

    The additional quality of a 3 CCD camera is not really necessary for basic Web video (since the files are compressed to speed up the download time) but that quality is required for TV. If you ever want to make a DVD and watch it on a flatscreen plasma TV, a 3 CCD camera will make all the difference.


    This page titled 10.2: Digital Video Cameras is shared under a CC BY-ND 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Mark Briggs via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.