Camcorders' versus Digital Cameras for taking still photographs.

The job of a camcorder is to record, process and store 30 frames a second. It could not possibly do that (for the price you expect to pay) if each frame were as large as 10 or 12 megapixels. Even the highest resolution HD TV available today (1080p) actually uses no more than 2Mpx per frame. It is therefore completely pointless for a camcorder to have a sensor which has a great deal more than that (some do claim to have 6.1 Mpx but this may only means that the video picture is slightly better because it is scaled DOWN from a larger image. The sensor used in a camcorder is also likely to be very different (some use three sensors) from a still camera and the processing firmware is VERY different. All this means that a digital camcorder is a VERY different animal from a still digital camera. The facility to take individual shots is something which is added for the convenience of the user (perhaps to take reference shots for indexing or to shoot frames in which there is no movement, perhaps for animation) and is quite basic and certainly can't be expected to have the quality or the range of adjustment available on still cameras. Conversely, a still camera is dedicated to taking very high quality images using a much larger sensor. Some can take videos but, in order to do so, they have to reprocess the high resolution image to the size required and, as this is not the main purpose that a user will want to use them for, the extra cost of the circuitry required is hardly justifiable. When deciding what to buy, you need to look carefully at what you will need most (if you can only buy one or the other). If you are mainly interested in taking high quality still photos which you intend to print at larger than the usual 10cm x 15cm (or whatever) and want some degree of manual control over your photos, then you should definitely buy a still camera, bearing in mind that most can shoot short and very simple videos. If your interest is mainly in shooting longer video sequences which you will, no doubt, edit to be transferred to DVD, then you will need the particular capabilities and ease of use of a camcorder.

I'm not sure about technical details but it's not profitable for the big companies that make camcoders to work on good quality of still pictures. People don't buy cams for their ability to take photos. I think that's quite logical.