Nobody answered in dpreview, maybe here?

www.dpreview.com is a digital camera site with very knowledgeable reviews and knowledgeable people in the forums. Anyhow here is a synopsis of a question I posed over 24 hours ago. I'll be a bit more elaborate here.

I have a Canon S400 digicam which does three minute movies. The thing is, the exposure is set at the beginning of the movie and does not change along with changes in lighting condition like a camcorder does. My question is do some of the more modern cameras change exposure during movie mode when the lighting conditions change. I know some people here have the SD300 which is a more modern Canon elph camera.

Well I know the Sony P93, Minolta A2, Minolta D7 and Nikon 8800 all do. I sometimes wish I could lock it, there is probably a way. The real annoying one for me is the auto focus; you see it focusing in and out in the movies trying to lock on. I lock the focus on movies to 3 meter, but my wife always forgets.

For the record the Sony by far takes the best movies. I can x-fer them to DVD and they look clearer then out of our canon mini-DV.

I just got the canon SD300, I'll look it up in the manual.

From the manual.

[ QUOTE ]
The AF and zoom settings remain fixed for subsiquent frames at the value set for the first frame.

Then

During filming the camera will automatically correct the exposure and white balance settings to suit the shooting conditions.

[/ QUOTE ]

When my 1GB card comes in I can take some movies to show this.

/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif The sony will fill the 1 gig in just over 12 min /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif Although 12 minutes is a long time when shooting a clip.

According to the manual the SD300 will fill a 512MB in 4min 9sec (at highest vid quality 640x480 30fps) so I should get 8 min or so on a 1 gig card. The short clips I have done so far (only get 6 seconds on the 16 meg card it came with) have good light and picture quality.

It's fun /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

I checked the manual for my quite old S110. It indicated that the focus would remain fixed at the value for the first frame. Don't know about exposure. I tried a few test clips, starting in the dark and moving into light, then reversing it. Couldn't see a difference. Maybe aperture does adjust in this cam. My newer Sony definitely does change focus. That was evident in standby. Again, the test clips appeared the same, so I suppose exposure is changing with conditions. The Sony manual said nothing on the subject.

Geoff

Check Canon's web site for firmware updates. Sometimes they issue updates that address issues like this.

-john