Digicam movie Vs DV cam Movie

[salu]

Please tell me the Quality difference between VGA/fine/30fps movie shot with a Digicam with 4 MP and DV footage shot with a 2 MP DV Cam. Does the quality of movies of these Digi Cams better than a DV Video camera? How come they are cheaper than a 2 megapixel DV camera? Why is that only very top end Dv cameras have 3 and above megapixels when these cheap Digtal still camera can shoot movies in 4 megapixels?

[thecoalman]

The first thing that comes to mind is file size, 1 hour of DV is about 14GB. Second you might want to look at the specs for what kind of video the digicam is making, if it were able to shoot full 4mp frames for video the space required would be enormous. 1 second of full frame DV footage requires about 3.5 mb.

[TerryG]

DV video in interlaced for standard TVs. Digicam video is progressive and looks better on the computer screen and may also be better for DVDs and progressive scan TVs. I would also be interested if anyone has made a comparison test.

[BSR]

VGA mode is 640x480. DV is 720x480.
Digicam with 4MP only uses all of them for still photos, not video.
I've seen some of the video on some digicams, they were no comparison to DV.
Resolution is only part of the issue, bitrate is the other and DV has a much higher bitrate than what I've seen on digicams. This is what makes the video look smooth during movement.

[proxyx99]

Digital camera processing is designed ond optimized for a still picture. They don't have electronics which primary function would be processing video clips. Video is an added feature. They use quite poor encoders usually in MPEG 4 format or its derivative. Optics quality, CCD size would suggest the opposite but the reality is these products were meant to take stills not high quality videos. There are dual function cams that are supposed to balance both out but the reality is that they cannot challenge quality of their single purpose peers in respective departments. Video cams are better for video and still cams are better for taking pictures. We are approaching the time when these two will be permanently married but not yet. Also, none of the still cams are capable of taking high quality MPEG2 or DV clips mainly due to storage medium limitations as well as cost factor.