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Star-Quality Video

You can get a pretty good-looking movie out of a couple of these devices. Four of the models we tested shoot video at 30 frames per second, and three of them capture VGA (640 by 480) resolution or higher. But our tests suggest that data rate is a better indicator of video quality. In general, the higher the data rate, the better the color, the smoother the motion, and the sharper the details. The Canon Elura 100, for instance, takes uncompressed, 720-by-4800-resolution video at 30 fps, with a data rate of 3.6 MBps. For our 2-minute test, this resulted in a 434MB file. The Treo 750 compresses on the fly to only 0.05 MBps; the same 2-minute shoot produced a file size of just 6MB.

A mere 6MB over 2 minutes doesn't translate into a lot of visual information, as the end results of our tests showed. Judges rated the Treo 750's as-captured video Poor for color accuracy, detail, and overall quality, and Fair for motion. The camera phone's color accuracy score improved to Fair on its optimized footage, but only because optimized video from the better performers degraded more noticeably.

Even the $50 American Idol camcorder beat the Treo 750, with a score of Fair for overall quality of both as-captured and optimized video. Nevertheless, the Idol fared much worse than any of the other devices did under low lighting.

As you'd expect, the Canon Elura MiniDV camcorder won the competition, with Good overall ratings for both as-captured and optimized footage. It excelled at maintaining motion quality in optimized movies.

Surprisingly, however, the Creative Webcam came pretty close to the Elura. It, too, received Good overall ratings for as-captured and optimized footage. Finally, the Panasonic digital camera scored average or above on most criteria, though its overall scores were only Fair for both the original and the optimized footage.