Hi guys, I'm thinking of getting an HD Camcorder for my Bday. Something between $400 and $650. But the main feature i'm most concerned with is getting one that films fairly well at night. Any suggestions?

Hi guys, I'm thinking of getting an HD Camcorder for my Bday. Something between $400 and $650. But the main feature i'm most concerned with is getting one that films fairly well at night. Any suggestions?

You'll have to define "night" a bit better. Are you saying "low light" or "NO light"?

Not sure which you're talking about but most Sony cams have what is called NIGHTSHOT which is the ability to shoot with no light at all through the use of Infra Red shooting. But the video turns out in the traditional 'army green night vision' style. I use this quite a bit and it works quite well.

Low light. Like... relying mostly on street lights. I heard it helps to have a 3ccd camcorder.

Low light. Like... relying mostly on street lights. I heard it helps to have a 3ccd camcorder.

It CAN help to have a 3CCD camcorder, but it's not that simple.

Your low-light quality depends on several things. One is simply how much light the camera can possibly collect. In a single sensor camcorder, your sensor (CCD or CMOS) has an array of color filters (usually the pattern invented by Dr. Bayer at Kodak) that allow interpolation of color... same idea as used in pretty much all digital still cameras. This was a real problem color-wise in the days of SD. It matters less as you go to HD and beyond (the Red Camera is a single chip camera, albeit one that can shoot 4K video), but it's still a light issue... every filter cuts out about 2/3 of the light entering that sensor site.

A 3-chip camera does much better, all else being equal -- light entering the lense is split 3-ways by a dichroic prism. So other than a slight loss in the prism, all light is going to a sensor somewhere. That's the good news.

The bad news is that a 3-chip camera may often have much smaller sensors than a single chip camera.. and pretty much always, if you're talking under a few thousand dollars. I bought a Panasonic SD9 for my daughter... great video for her purposes, but with three 1/6" sensors, it's pretty questionable in low light. In fact, until the Panny TM300, all of their consumer 3-chippers had much lower than usual performance in low light.

The other issue with low-light is noise... if a sensor chip has less noise, you can boost the amplification up a bit and still get clean video.

Anyway, there are numerous consumer models, though often fine those at the $1000-$1500 range get the best sensors, and those in the $500-or-so range are a bit less well endowed. For low-light performance on the cheap, check out the Sanyo VPC-FH1... but don't expect prosumer features in a $400 camcorder, other than really good video. For a bit more, I like Canon's S10/100 series as well as the TM300. Sony's new HDR-500V has a slightly smaller sensor than the Canon or the Sanyo, but Sony claims they're building the chips differently, to take advantage of light better, and these do seem to offer at least comparable performance. You have to drill down into reviews for the details.