Digital Convergence

Consumer digital still cameras have long offered limited movie-shooting capability, and some digital camcorders have provided the ability to shoot decent-quality still images. But of late, those capabilities have improved immensely, and today you can make good videos with many digital still cameras, and good stills with a number of digital camcorders.

Why this “convergence” of digital still and movie capabilities? Because consumers asked for it, lots of R&D effort (and expense) has produced the technology to do it, and, as Chuck Westfall of Canon U.S.A. (which offers both digital still cameras and camcorders) points out, “The rapid advances in broadband penetration and the resultant increases in computer and Internet usage worldwide have created an ongoing movement toward a new level of popularity for digital imaging of all kinds.”

What does it all mean to you? We’ll get to that shortly, but first let’s look at some of those improvements.

Still-Camera Movies
Today, all but the lowest-priced digital still cameras (and digital SLRs) provide movie capability. Resolution is up, with clearer-looking images on TV sets and bigger images on computer monitors. Quite a few of today’s digital still cameras can shoot movies at 640 x 480-pixel VGA resolution, which matches the video on any standard-definition television. The Canon PowerShot S80 digital still camera lets you shoot movies at 1024 x 768-pixel XGA resolution—closer to HD television.

Frame rates are up, too. A number of current digital still cameras will shoot VGA-resolution movies at 30 fps, a big improvement over the 15 fps that was once the still-camera standard: 30 fps is comparable to what you see on television, while 15 fps looks a bit jerky. Faster frame rates not only mean smoother-looking movies on-screen, but can provide slow-motion capabilities. Several of the Canon Digital Elph models and the new Canon PowerShot S3 IS will shoot at 60 fps (at 320 x 240-pixel QVGA resolution). Panasonic’s new Lumix DMC-TZ1 and Lumix DMC-FX01 models can shoot wide-aspect VGA (848 x 480-pixel) movies at 30 fps.