Our video ecard clips at www.rent-a-cloud.com are shot on 16mm film,
then transferred to digital  for editing - cumbersome and expensive. We
want to change over to camcorders, but don't know which is the best
for our needs. We live in a rural area where nobody has any knowledge
in this field. And calls to Sony/JVC/Canon gave confusing and
conflicting answers.
Our Needs:
    1) the camcorder must deliver the same image quality/detail as our
existing clips show. Most are shot into extreme contrast light like
skies and rising/setting suns.
    2) the camcorder must have single-frame film mode as our clips are
shot in stop-frame-motion technique.
    3) the camcorder must have manual zoom and exposure controls.
Question: which is the cheapest camcorder to meet these demands?
Sincere thanks for reply - Klaus Jaritz
ps: Unfortunately, to ascertain the image quality required you would
have to send some clips as ecards to yourself. It's free. Only then
will you have a file (wmv) which opens across the whole monitor screen.
Sorry for this bother.

Whatever you buy will need to be in the seriously professional area,
where the companies are generally eager to promote their very
expensive wares.  Go to the professional sites of Sony, Panasonic etc
and get contact information. Sony is at www.sonybiz.net for instance.
Your biggest problem will be the contrast ratio you want. You're
unlikely to get all you desire in that area. Manual zoom and exposure
are normal for anything from the prosumer level up.

Also camcorders generally don't do single stop frame, but computers
do, so you could solve that problem by using a laptop as a recorder.

Bernie

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