Digital Camcorder..

[magic]

any recomendations for an inexpensive video camera, small, that easily records in WMV?

thanks

[Firefoxx]

That's not a typical request... the WMV part, that is. Most camcorders will record on miniDV tape, mini DVD discs, harddisks, or flash memory. They will usually use either DV AVI or mpeg2 formats. The reason that WMV is not used is because it's a highly compressed format that's not very good for real-time on-the-fly recording... you'd need a powerful processor to do that. The quality also wouldn't be great.

If you want cheap and still want quality, I suggest that you get a normal miniDV camcorder. The cheapest would be around 15k baht, and pretty small. Mini DVD camcorders are more expensive and have less quality and recording time. Harddisk camcorders are more expensive still, and have even less quality, but a lot of recording time (until you run out of space, that is).

[astral]

We covered video cameras in the photography section a few weeks back.

I am not sure you will find one that records in WMV directly.

You will have to do conversion on your PC.

I wonder why you chose that format?

[magic]

We covered video cameras in the photography section a few weeks back.

I am not sure you will find one that records in WMV directly.

You will have to do conversion on your PC.

I wonder why you chose that format?

Well, my purpose is to spend minimal amount of $, & put what I record onto a CD or DVD for another person to easily view on their computer..or possibly their TV, which would be ideal !

[Firefoxx]

The less you spend, the less quality you get. The reason that people use normal miniDV tapes is that they're cheap, they hold a lot of video, they're standard, they have great quality (depends on the camera too, of course), and the cameras themselves are cheap. You can connect the camcorder to the computer to transfer the data, edit the video, and then encode it into whatever format you want. You can author a DVD in DVD quality with this video.

15k baht is already pretty darn cheap. If you want cheaper, you can just get one of those gadget hand-held camcorders that record to memory, or a digicam that can do videos. Don't expect miracles from a cheesy gadget.