The lenses

[Kerem]

Well as a student i want to buy a 3ccd cam and i want something good the first hand but i noticed that Canon XL2 has a longer distance lens than the hdr-fx1 will that effects my movie alot ; i mean do you think 12x is too short ?

could you please help me again :)

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Depends entirely what you want to do with it. The numbers you mention don't mean a lot on their own anyway - they refer to the zoom range based on the widest end, so if you have a 20x lens with a 5mm wide end, you'll have a 100mm long end.

 

Frankly on a small consumer CCD anything beyond about 80mm is positively hubble-space-telescope so I don't think this is a huge issue. The longest range won't be that useful to you. You'll almost certainly find that the image quality degrades more on the wider-ranging 20x zoom as you get towards the long end - I own a 20x broadcast lens and beyond about 80-90mm it starts to go fuzzy round the edges of the picture. Not that this will necessarily happen with the XL2, but it's likely.

 

Generally the issue with lenses is how wide they go, not how long they go. Wide lenses can help to smooth out handheld shooting, and they're useful - but since they're hard to make, especially for consumer cameras with small CCDs, you don't often get a very wide end. If the choice was lens only, I'd go for whatever's widest, but there's a lot more separating the two cameras you mention than just the lenses.

 

Phil

 

In any case, there are many other issues w

[Kerem]

Well mostly i want a camera to shoot in indoor locations and rarely for outdoor locations for short films, as i understand from what you said the hdr-fx1 will be fine for this kind of sitiuations or wouldnt it?

 

 

#####by the way thanks for your reply , because there isn't anyone who can help me here in Turkey about HD video.#########