Cameras

Hello,

If this is more suitable in another part of the forum, apologies.

Trying to take the general advice of getting out there and filming my own stuff. However I am always paranoid that I will buy something and then find out there is something better at a better price.

But anyway, as a a fair number of you shoot your own things can anyone recommend any cameras to use for short films, sketches etc. Nothing too expensive around the £300 mark, max £450. From some scouting around I've done already, a lot seem to promote they have shooting options that provide cinematic quality, this is something I'm interested in. Plus any additional recommendations for external microphones would be nice.

Thanks

I use a Sony DCR TRV240E which is a Digital8 tape machine.

It was possibly the last model Sony Digital 8 machine that had not been dumbed down for domestic users and still had features like External microphone & headphones socket, manual focus ability, backlighting adjustment etc etc. It also can playback Analog 8 mm tapes and output in digital form from the Firewire socket. It can even do that on the fly with analogue video/audo signals fed in through the video/audo input socket (I.e not using the actual internal camera or tape player).

I also rate quite highly the threaded front to the lens that lets me add filters & other goodies and an accessory shoe on top and a tripod socket on the bottom. Ah it also does infra red night shots and has some infra-red lights built in for use in total darkness.

So I can use it to play/transcribe to digital all my old analogue 8mm tapes from my earlier Sony (rather large) camcorder.

At its peak this TRV240E sold at around £600-£700 but I waited until its dumber replacement was issued & then bought it as an 'old' model at around £400. It was hard to find anyone who still had one though so I very nearly missed it.

Anyway I've not kept up with the specs of more modern solid state cameras, but try to find one in which they have built in some of these extra facilities. All too many nowadays do not have microphone/phones sockets, so you can't use a long-range microphone or radio-mic.

I just purchased a camera off eBay that when it was new (3 years ago) was £600-£700 but I got it for £170. So definitely check out ebay. This was the seller I bought it from:

http://shop.ebay.co.uk/digicamss/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=25

Obviously it's out of warranty but the price was good enough for me to take a risk and the camera is awesome!

Spec. wise you should go for Hi-Def 1080 camera with recording to either hard disk or SD card. I don't know about quality but these formats are just so much easier to use than tape.

External mics. I dunno.