Which HDD handycam is the all around easiest to use?

When is it a good idea to use a telephoto lens on a video camera?

• I have a Sony handycam hdd. I bought a wide angle lens and a telephoto lens seprate from a professinal photo store. I was wondering when will it be a good idea to use a telephoto lens. I am going to a NASCAR race Friday and I want to shoot video and I might be up in the stands. I am a big anti digital zoom person cause it destroys the quality so would a telephoto of about 2x be necassary for this event? Any help?

• Answer:

  Digital zoom should be turned off (you can do this in the menu). Yes, if you are in the stands, using the tele-lens will help - but you will need to use a monopod (not recommended) or tripod (preferred) to keep things steady when fully zoomed in on something. As a hard disc drive camcorder you may have a bigger issue - this is not specific to Sony camcorders, but to hard drives... They don't like loud audio and high levels of prolonged vibration. The heads will park and not record video. If the vibration remainf for more than a few seconds, the camcorder's internal "buffer" will fill and a "Buffer Overflow" error message will appear. When the vibration goes away, the recording will resume. The camcorder manual says turning off the drop sensor can prevent that error message, but you risk crashing the hard drive and totally killing the camcorder (and that won't be covered under warranty). This is one of the manin reasons I do not recommend consumer camcorders that use internal hard drive storage. (Flash memory and miniDV tape do not suffer from this vibration issue.) Hopefully, your seats are far enough away from the race where the vibration is not an issue for your camcorder... and the crowd or other audio does not make enough noise/vibration to cause recording issues... Hopefully you are able to record during the daytime and the sunlight provides you good lighting... I suggest you increase the shutter speed to 1/1000 (or faster). Any faster than that and the aperture can't open enough and the image will start getting dark. Doing this will help keep the video interlacing artifacts down and you will have a better chance at getting still-image video frame grabs and clearer slow motion when you edit. Good luck.