MiniDV Camcorder or Digital Still Camera: Which is better?
If you’re a photo buff and want to take high-quality still pictures, I highly recommend a digital SLR, such as the Canon Digital Rebel or the Nikon D70. When I first wrote this FAQ, I used my video camera as a digital still camera. There was just nothing on the market in the digital still camera field that was better. Nowadays, though, Digital SLRs are so much better than video cameras to take stills that there is no contest. At all. Some video cameras now have still photography options, but in my opinion they’re next to worthless. If you want to create stills from your videos, you should bear the following in mind: Digital video is highly compressed and a lot of detail is left on the cutting room floor when the image is saved. This is necessary to make it possible to save 30 images a second to tape, but current still image technology lets us take single images that are a megabyte in size or more.
