New Birding Camcorder (1 Viewer)

I wonder if anyone has advice or can recommend the best camcorder for videoscoping currently on the market. There are just so many out there and with none specifically designed for birding purpose it's all a bit of a minefield. I'm particularly interested in one that will give decent 'grabs'.
I'm using a Leica 'scope to quite good effect currently with a Panasonic NV GS44 but it is beginning to show serious wear and tear and I'm in the market for a new model. But which one.......
Thanks

Hi Nick,
I am using a Sony SR5E HD camcorder slotted on to a Kenco 80a scope and getting some good results.
It has a 40gig hard drive and a big bright screen which tilts, ideal for video scoping. I confess I can't fault it in any way.

You will need a poweful computer to process the AVCHD files, at the moment I simply store them on a seperate Hard drive, they can then be put back on the camera for viewing on an HD TV via an HDMI cable.

Staggeringly good quality.......................

The Sony software supplied will allow simple trimming of clips and conversion to MPEG2 files, these can be put onto DVD.

I have D/Loaded a trial version of the Sony Vegas editing programme and have been editing some of the HDef clips adding a title and transitions, these I converted to MPEG and saved to my hard drive and then on to a DVD....................perfect.................

Camcorder from Ebay, I got the camcorder and a £100 battery for £499, but I think he has stopped offering the battery with the camera.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/NEW-Sony-Hand...ryZ11724QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Mine has had a real hammering for the last few weeks, I take it everywhere, and took 20Gig of "film" in the USA a couple of weeks ago.

There are a few of my video grabs in some other topics in this section.


Go for it Nick, you won't regret it

Den

Thanks very much for your prompt and helpful reply.
That sounds like a great bit of kit and considerably more sophisticated than my current Panasonic.
If you have time could you answer the following points:

Can you play back footage on the camcorder and freeze it frame by frame then take a grab of one of these frames and save it as a jpeg to a memory card installed on the camcorder, or can you only take grabs whilst editing on a computer?

If you can do the above do you happen to know what maximum size and resolution these grabs would be?

Do you happen to know what the filter thread size is?

Do you use a special adaptor that screws onto this filter thread?

I think the only answer of course is for me to try this camcorder out in a shop, always easier said than done of course.

Nick, the thread is 37mm (1 1/4 Inch) I destroyed an old cheap wide angle lens and machined up a tube and superglued it to the lens body. The tube slides over my scope lens. I adjusted the length so the lenses almost touch.

I get a clear vignette at wide angle up to about 2x zoom on the camera. Part of the vignetting is because the camera is wide screen.

Over 2x the vignette dissapears, but I can only speak for my scope setup.
The scope is best used at the lowest (20x) mag but the camera will up this to 200x if you want. Pic quality suffers, though for TV showing they are pretty good.

I don't think you can copy from the video to the memory card, I have not bought one yet The stills function is 3mb on the SR5E but is 6mb on the SR7E, and this also has an eyeviewfinder. I missed this at first, but soon got used to following the action while watching the screen. The 7E is a lot more expensive.

The screen is BIG, BRIGHT and BEAUTIFUL.

Den

That's all very valuable information. Many Thanks. I'll have to go and see if I can try one out with my scope set-up.

Nick,
There's been some good discussions in the previous threads here and many people are using the new Sony's Hd cameras, including me. The only complication is the size of the HD files and the fact that I was using a Mac but the newer Apple software will handle it now. Neil.