Night Mode Camcorder - Lux??

Question

Hey Everyone,

I am going ghost hunting this weekend and need to get a camcorder, you know the Most Haunted types lol.

I am very confused though when i want to know what has a good night mode and which doesn't. They keep referring to lux sensitivity. If i want to film in a very dark room with no light or minimal light what lux rating do i go for?

Thank you very much!

BenE

Answer 1

Some claim they will film in just 2 or 3 lux, which is pretty dark.
To film in total darkness, some have an infra-red emitter to judge distance for focusing.
Whether infra-red pulses will frighten away your ghosts is anyone's guess.

Answer 2

Lux is a standard unit used to measure luminance, related to other measures, namely the lumen and the candella, which you may have heard of.

To give you an idea, 10 lux is about the level of light given by a small candle from a distance of about 1 foot. Bright moonlight is about 1 lux.

When used in reference to video cameras, this lux value specifies what the minimum required light level is for the camera to produce viewable images (but you probably guessed this already).

I use a Sony DCR-HC96, and I have had this in conditions <1 lux before. It has a night mode, which I used. As a previous answerer said, Sony cameras have a small lamp on the front which emits infa-red light when you put it on night-time mode. This light is invisible to the naked eye, but the night-time sensor on the camera can image it, producing a single-colour (green-ish, because human eyes can differentiate more levels of green than other colours) image. You'll probably have seen this type of image before on the TV - and it looks very Blair-witch, probably just right for ghost hunting!

However, you should be aware that this is not a powerful lamp and is useless at illuminating anything further away than, say, 3 or 4 meters. When something is within range, though, the quality of image is very good and doesn't suffer from the 'grainy' or 'noisy' image produced by less-sophisticated amplification techniques.

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

All Sonys are 0 Lux because they use infra red.

Others use light amplifers and mutiple pixels which add grainness and require 2 lux or better.

Answer 4

This video watch?v=U50AsQMTIfM&feature=youtu.be on YouTube shows hunting pests at night with a camera attached to the sight. the camera info starts at 7:00 minutes. The name of the video is "Shooting Kit".

Answer 5

night mode is the novice term for "benefit" benefit is the processor pushing the sunshine interior the image to checklist in low mild on broaodcast cameras they have 4 stages of ND filtering for reliable mild and four settings for benefit benefit will make the photographs recorded far extra grainy and much less sharp, amatuer cams have one or 2 stages of benefit a