• Cheap digital camera setup?

  • Discussion of photography and videography techniques, equipment and technology, and links to personal railroad-related photo galleries.
Discussion of photography and videography techniques, equipment and technology, and links to personal railroad-related photo galleries.

Moderators: nomis, keeper1616

  by CPSK
 
Hi;
I would like to take railfan videos but don't have the money to buy a digital camcorder. My old Sony FX525 is broken.
I have a Dell Inspiron notebook computer with an 80GB drive and a USB2 port, so I was wondering whether I could get an inexpensive camera to connect to that port and take videos to my HDD.
I know I can get a webcam real cheap, but how good is the image going to be? From what I've been used to seeing on RR webcams, it's not that good.
The quality I am looking for is only enough for a decent video for YouTube.
I've got a microphone and sound editing software, so that wouldn't be a problem either.

Thanks for any ideas

FW
  by LIRRMEDFORD
 
Well this is not really a computer/camera fix it issue but since your looking to buy and not fix I'm gunna move ya down to the Railroad Photography and Video forum and see if they can help you there. My recommendation as far as the computer though is don't even try it. If all its got is an 80 Gig hard drive if might not be able to play the best videos cause it might have other limited functions. As for what camera to get here is my input

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Kodak-C142-blue-bndl/14291468

Thats the camera I use and It takes some decent videos. You can see its results on my Youtube page. Just look up LIRRMEDFORD happy camera hunting :-D
  by RedLantern
 
Here's my first (and currently only) railroad video online, I have more coming, many more, I just need the time to upload them all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvp5tTlXtLo

This was shot with a $150 Flip UltraHD camera with a $45 37mm wide angle lens superglued on to it and a $15 tripod from Radio Shack.

The camera cost me $150 at Staples, it can only shoot for 2 hours at a time and has no external storage so once you use up your two hours, you need to plug it into a computer to load the video before you can start recording again. In the course of a full day of railfanning, I've never gone over the two hours since each clip of a train is only a few minutes at a time. The video above is 3:29, that one train is 3 and a half minutes out of the two hour total capacity, and if I'm going to be out for a long time, I'll bring my laptop with me so I can offload the video if I need more time.

This camera is not designed for professional use, it's really only a "point and shoot" camera made for simple home movies. That being said, I have a 46" Sony Bravia LCD TV, and when I plug this camera in through it's mini-HDMI jack, the image quality is incredible. The camera is also unbelievably simple to use, it's light correction, image stabilization, etc. are all completely automatic. There's a simple setup menu, but other than that there's no settings, it's completely automatic and I'm more than satisfied with the result. The audio on the other hand, isn't bad, but the microphone definitely picks up wind noise badly, and there's no jack for an external mic. I taped a piece of a facial tissue over the mic and that seems to cut down on the wind noise. It also seems to dampen the sound, but luckilly, freight trains still tend to be really loud, so it hasn't been a problem so far (the people behind me that kept talking while I shot the video above are a different story).

As I mentioned before, I superglued on a lens. This camera doesn't have any kind of support for additional lenses, like I said, it's just supposed to be a simple point-and-shoot video camera. From the advice I learned from various websites and blogs, I bought a Sunpak wide angle lens which came with screw-on adapter rings. I superglued a ring around the built-in lens and can now screw on my big lens for the really wide angle shot you see above. I'd like to get a nice telephoto lens to put on here, but for the time being, I have a hard enough time affording enough gas and red-bull for chases.

I'm not overly happy with the battery life, the battery that comes with it is Lithium-Ion, it will last a good 3 hours of continuous use, and charges through the USB jack that is also used to download the videos off the camera. The weird thing is that it will only charge while connected to a computer or to it's own proprietary wall or car charger that goes for about $30 from their website. It recognized being connected to power when I plugged it into the USB car charger I use for my iPod, but it wouldn't charge. One day I pulled the battery out and noticed the diagrams for AA batteries. The cheap AA batteries won't last 5 minutes, but Duracell seems to power it for over an hour of continuous use (as in, not counting when the camera is off), and I can get a 20 pack of Duracell AA batteries at Home Depot for $10 bucks, it's lasted me over a month so far. Energizer works well too, but the less popular brands (eveready, purecell, panasonic, store brand, etc.) barely last 5 minutes.

This is the cheap-as-hell solution I use that seems to work great for me, be careful when buying cheap cameras, you definately get what you pay for, but in the less than 6 months that I've had this setup, I'm more than satisfied.
  by CPSK
 
Hi guys;
Thanks for the suggestions.
I have an old (2001) Olympus C3040 that will take a 2 minute video :( , but the quality isn't that good, and it uses the old .mov format, which I cannot view on my Windows 7 media player. I'm sure I could get the right player, but it's not worth it for that amount of video.

I like LIRRMEDFORD's idea. I hadn't thought of gluing a lens onto a point & shoot. Were you able to focus over the entire zoom range of the lens?
Have you ever tried the Sanyo Eleloop rechargable batteries? They've got a lot more capacity than normal NiCd's, and are inexpensive. I paid only about $15 for 4 AA batteries plus the 4 battery wall charger.

I realized after my post that using a simple webcam would never work, since it would not zoom, and has no LCD to aid me in aiming it at what I want to shoot. I could use the laptop itself as the viewer, but that would be quite clumsy, trying to aim the camera while watching the screen on the computer.

As far as the small 80GB hard drive; that wouldn't be a problem, since I would only be using it to store the video files until I can download them onto my home PC.

I may look into the point & shoot idea, or maybe I'll check Ebay for a real digital camcorder. I'm sure there are plenty of "slightly used" ones out there, as so many people get them as gifts (or buy them for themselves) and then find that they don't have much use for them.

FW
  by RedLantern
 
The lens covers the entire area of the zoom range, but then again, the small side of the lens that goes against the camera is about a quarter inch wider than the built in lens on the camera. In the video I posted earlier, the camera is zoomed out all the way.

If you do glue a lens on to your camera, don't make the same mistake I did. Glue the adapter ring on and let the glue completely cure before putting the lens on. I bought the lens at Best Buy, glued it on while sitting in my truck in the parking lot, and then went directly to a commuter rail station to catch a westbound pig train. That shot came out beautifully, but when I saw another train about an hour later, I went to catch it but the image looked like I was in a dense fog. When I took the lens off to clean it, I found that the fumes from the glue coated the entire backside of the lens as well as the protective lens on the camera. It took me almost an hour of wiping it with a lint-free cloth and almost a whole bottle of lens cleaner just to get the junk off. There's still some left on the edges of the lens that I couldn't get off, but it's outside the range that the camera uses and doesn't affect the image quality.

As far as playing .mov videos, get a copy of VLC Media Player, it's a free, open source video player that can play just about any format out there without installing any third-party codecs. Just install this one program and play pretty much everything right off the bat.
  by Tony Clifton
 
CPSK wrote:Hi;
I would like to take railfan videos but don't have the money to buy a digital camcorder. My old Sony FX525 is broken.
I have a Dell Inspiron notebook computer with an 80GB drive and a USB2 port, so I was wondering whether I could get an inexpensive camera to connect to that port and take videos to my HDD.
I know I can get a webcam real cheap, but how good is the image going to be? From what I've been used to seeing on RR webcams, it's not that good.
The quality I am looking for is only enough for a decent video for YouTube.
I've got a microphone and sound editing software, so that wouldn't be a problem either.

Thanks for any ideas

FW
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