Buying a Professional Video Camera – 10 Things You Should Look for to Make the Right Choice

While buying a camera for your everyday needs and family pictures is simple and usually takes into account only resolution, backlight sensors, zoom capacity or memory, when looking for a professional video camera, the situation changes completely.

Here are 10 features you should look for to ensure you make the right choice:

  1. Focus – Everyone seems to prefer automatic nowadays, but to make sure your camera does not drift in or out of focus, look for a manual one. It will also help you develop your creativity and shoot some unique pictures that you can only dream of with automatic focus cameras.
  2. Iris – It will let you adjust the lens aperture and implicitly the exposure and brightness of the images you shoot, allowing you to work with natural light only, and ensuring you will not have to worry about adding spotlights or anything like that.
  3. White Balance – It allows you to control the way light appears in the pictures (sunlight for example is usually blue, bulb light tends towards yellow and combinations of the two can appear strange and out of place) and shoot pictures that look perfectly natural or, on the contrary, play with light to create shades and mystery.
  4. Sound – Why leave the decision to chance when you can manually adjust the volume of the sounds you record, completely remove background noise or emphasize what you think might be interesting.

    5. Latest filming technology

  5. CCDs – These chips turn the real world into digital images and, as far as they are concerned, 3 is the lucky number for a professional video camera, allowing its user to record crisp and color-saturated high quality videos.
  6. Headphones – They don’t have to be included in the camera kit, but make sure you have a jack to plug them into, so that you can monitor the sound you record.
  7. Microphone input – Cameras with a built-in microphone are easier to use, but the sound quality is quite low, so using an external microphone could really improve the quality of your recordings.
  8. Filter screw ring – It would be useful to have one around the lens to let you add a UV, a “polarizing” or a “star” filter, to protect the lens or improve the image quality of your recordings.
  9. Lens adapter – If you cannot afford a camera with removable lenses, the lens adapters will allow you to change the recording angle and adjust the images you shoot.
  10. Auto mode – having the possibility to adjust the settings manually is very good, but sometimes, when the circumstances allow it, it would be useful to have the possibility to switch to auto and not have to worry about anything.

If you keep all these aspects in mind and pay a little attention to the brand and the rest of the features you would normally consider when buying a camera, there is no doubt you will end up with the best deal you could ever make for a professional video camera.



 
  »