Greetings Klaus

A few more things, especially if you will be traveling:

- Canon’s A & S-series cameras use AA batteries, rather than proprietary Li-ion batteries. While I usually use NiMH rechargeable batteries, I can use alkalines.

- The S5 (and S3) have 12x optical zoom, 36-432mm 35mm equivalent.

- They can use wide-angle and telephoto converters (and filters) with an adapter tube. I have 0.73x and 1.6x Raynox converters for the S3, which allows me to shoot from 26mm to 690mm (35mm equivalent).

- They have many modes and manual controls, almost as much as my Canon 30D.

- They have superb macro modes and can focus right down to the front of the lens.

- They weigh about 1.2 lbs with batteries, so you can use a very lightweight tripod or monopod. With the adapter tube and teleconverter, my S3 weighs less than 2 lb. For traveling, my S3 “system” weighs about 2.7 lbs (camera, 2 converters, adapter tube, several filters, extra batteries and SDHC card). If I were to get an S5, I’d also get an external flash–the S5 has a flash shoe, while the S3 does not.

One downfall of using my A650 is any zoom I do is a digital zoom, whether it is zoom in or zoom out. I can zoom in before I start recording and everything is great, but once I press record, the zooming is only digital. But, the IS feature on the A650 is great for when I am zoomed way in to the subject.

That’s a problem with most digital cameras used for video–except for a few, inlcuding the Canon S5IS and its predecessors, the S3IS and S2IS. They CAN zoom while taking a movie. This is, in part, because they use Canon’s Ultrasonic Motor for zooming and focusing. Most cameras’ zoom is quite noisy. (Even my S3IS’s zoom is audible if I use the “high-speed” zoom, rather than the normal zoom. Sometimes, one can hear the zoom toggle switch.) See

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canons3is/page7.asp

http://www.steves-digicams.com/2006_reviews/s3is_samples.html

for examples with the S3 IS. (The baseball game clip on the latter page shows what you can do. Remember that it was taken with a STILL camera, not a camcorder.)

The Canon TX1 “hybrid” camera also zooms while taking movies. It even looks like a small camcorder, with the same truly stupid, ergonomically disastrous “vertical” format of cheap camcorders. (Actually, the TX1 is WORSE than most vertical camcorders.)

FWIW, I also have a Canon A650IS, primarily because it is smaller than the S3 IS (and a LOT smaller than my Canon 30D).

One of the main reasons I use my Canon A650 for video is that it has a very wide lens. Great for shooting my 3 kids (under age 5) around the house. With my camcorder I had to back up into a corner to video tape them and I still could not get the shot I wanted. With the A650 I can sit at the dinner table 2 feet away from them and get the shot I want.

One downfall of using my A650 is any zoom I do is a digital zoom, whether it is zoom in or zoom out. I can zoom in before I start recording and everything is great, but once I press record, the zooming is only digital. But, the IS feature on the A650 is great for when I am zoomed way in to the subject.

Now when we go to the zoo, park, birthday parties, out in the yard, or out on an adventure with our kids I never have to miss video or still images if I carry my Canon A650. I love it!

I also love that I can save the downloaded video files to a library that I organize just like my photo images.

My son has made entire movies using the very same idea. We have an old 5MG Pixel Canon PowerShot. Been doing it for some time. And it only gets about 3 minutes of video.

Michael,

Once you go HD, you will never want to bother with standard def ever again.

And, there are now HD digicams, like Kodak’s V1253, and several Panasonics that all shoot 720p at 30fps. Having video that automatically gets imported into iPhoto, and can be imported into iMovie, can’t get any simpler.

For me, though, this isn’t the best solution. My first (film) camera was double-eight, in the late 60s - early 70s. I was a kid when my dad taught me how to operate it and I have been shooting moving images since then. going through four camcorders since the 90s (Sony 8, then Hi-8, then MiniDV, then 16×9 MiniDV), I’m ready to move to HD. My children are small enough that I feel a move to HD would better preserve the most precious moments from their childhood.

The thing that is important there, though, is the fact that new HD camcorders are just as much still picture cameras, as the new still cameras are camcorders. There are enough megapixels in those HD CMOS chips to capture a decent still picture when I need one. The ability to capture high quality HD video is, for me, more important. 8GB SDHC cards can capture around 1 hour of AVCHD video, which is more than enough for a single session. Wherever I go, I have a Mac around (laptop or a home iMac) to offload the dailies.

As tech advances, these two categories will continue to converge. As much as they are significantly different in their purpose, and consequently, in their image-processing software, the end results will continue to be ever more similar. Eventually, they might end up becoming a truly single device.