My digital video camera (panasonic DS1) has firewire capability and I need to get absolutely the best quality still pictures out of it from my printer. I have a pentium 111 computer and wonder exactly what would be the best hardware to get to accomplish this, (keeping everything digital to maintain quality), along with any other information about how to go about it.

-- rod prynne (rodprynne@xsinet.co.za), July 17, 2000

Answers

Sounds like you need a firewire or IEEE1394 interface card and the appropriate software. Check with the manufacturer, I'd expect they offer a package. From what I hear, you have to be careful since not all the cards are as compatible as you'd think just yet. It's still an "emerging standard".

If you're really serious about the absolute best stills, even a 1.3MP digital camera will easily best those available from any digital video recorder on the market, so far as I know. A 2MP or 3MP digicam would certainly blow them away.

So far, digital video recorders just don't have enough sensor resolution to produce really good stills. It's kind of tough to record good stills on a digital recorder and seems equally difficult to get really impressive video on a digicam due to memory limitations, frame rates, compression, etc. There does seem to be convergence between the two, maybe in another couple of years a truly integrated product equally adept at both will be available. I'd buy one if it was priced in the neighborhood of a 3.3MP digicam with still, video, and a high quality long zoom lens.[Don't want much do I? :-) ]

I kind of wonder if the IBM microdrives won't usher in a new digital still/camcorder product with no moving parts other than the zoom, focus & shutter, and within the microdrive itself? With larger and larger capacity microdrives or even larger compactflash units it'd probably make for a killer product and probably would be relatively inexpensive to produce and highly reliable without rotating heads or tape to get dirty or mangled. Add on a DVD-RAM burner with realtime MPEG2 compressor and it'd really be killer. More, more, give me more... ;-)

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@surferz.net), July 18, 2000.