What's the Best Camcorder? by Andrew Alexander Published on Dec 26, 2001 12:00 AM

In order to produce videocameras that are economical, camera companies must compromise a number of criteria. For example, low-price cameras will be made of cheaper materials, have an average-quality lens and very few features. In contrast, expensive cameras will have a solid build quality, will use top-quality components, have many manual settings, and lots of options. Cameras inbetween those two extremes will have some things, but not others.

When you ask the question, ''what is the best camcorder'', ideally you want to be asking a person or a group of people who have owned many different camcorders, keep current with recent technical developments, and are fairly open-minded. If you ever find such a group of people, I should think you would be very lucky. Most of the time you will be asking someone who is loyal to a particular brand, another one who has only ever owned one camcorder, and another whose best friend is a camera salesman. Each one will have their own points of view which are heavily biassed, and not based in fact. The problem is that much of the information available on camcorders is heavily ''skewed'' by advertising which is not easily comparable. Looking for the ''best'' camcorder assumes you can use a set of common criteria to find a winner in all categories, and you’re not likely to find any.

A better question to ask would be, ''what is the best camcorder for five hundred dollars'' (or whatever price category). At least then the person you’re asking can put your question in a context and make certain assumptions about what you’ll use it for. If you ask me what the best camcorder is and I tell you it’s the XL-1, the answer will do you no good if you can only spend a thousand dollars and the XL-1 costs four.

An even better question to ask would be, ''what is the best camcorder if I want to ____, and I can only spend '' where the first criteria is your intended purpose, and your second criteria is how much you can spend. You have to do some research about what a videocamera can offer before you get into ''buying'' mode.

The more details you can provide about what you need in a camera, the better for you, and the person you’re asking. For example, if you know you’re going to be taking this camera into rugged areas, you’re going to want a solid camera rather than something that may break if you drop it (or, that it doesn’t cost a lot of money in case you do!). If you know you’re going to be using the camera in dark spaces, you may want (or need) a camera with good low-light capabilities. If you need it for security work, will you need ''nightshot'' capability? Will you need your camera to take stills as well as video? If you keep asking and answering these questions, you will narrow down the possibilities until you’re left with the ''best'' camcorder - for your needs.

Remember that while a camera’s statistics on paper may be significant, you should try it out as extensively as possible in the store before you buy. After all, if you’re about to drop a significant amount of money on this thing, you had better be happy with it in practice!