Not much cop I thought, until about six weeks ago when my wife bought one out of her catalogue. She has not put it down since it arrived.
The Canon 8mm Video Camcorder (uc-v200), priced at just over £450, came complete with everything needed to take your first shots. The compact power pack used to recharge your battery, scart adapter to connect the camcorder to your VCR, AV cable, shoulder strap and a remote controller which you use to operate the camcorder from a distance of upto 5 metres.
It has a 3’’ LCD screen to monitor recording and playback, or you can use the view finder. (the bit you put your eye to). Canon’s FlexiZone Control is a completely new way of selecting any object or subject that appears on the screen by letting you place your chosen image in a frame that you can move about, and then the camera will bring it into focus, a movable frame within a frame. There is a complete set of editing functions built in so you can turn your recordings into finished productions with no extra equipment to buy. From wide-angle to 22x telephoto the digital zoom magnifies this upto 100x and the picture magnifies upto 290x with the Digital Effects.
You can have a lot of fun using the Digital Effects and Faders, this technology allows you to add special effects to different scenes of your recordings. It even produces images in 16:9 format for playback on widescreens. Some of these effects are Mosaic, Mirror, Negative-Positive and ART which adds a paint-like effect called Solarization.
With a built-in microphone, and the option to plug in an additional external microphone, you have in this camcorder a complete movie making machine.
My advice would be to buy an additional battery pack for outdoors use because if you use the LCD screen to view your image or playback it does drain your battery faster than if you use the viewfinder.
All you need then is a couple of daft, (or staged), moments captured on tape and sent in to ’’You’ve Been Framed’’ and your camera is payed for. Note there is a lot more to this camcorder than what I have outlined here.