Virtually all consumer model camcorders come with a pull-out, color LCD screen as well as a black and white viewfinder. You can use either one, but not both at the same time. (You don’t need to.)
Although the LCD screen can be hard to see in extremely bright light, I sure love them in most other situations.
LCD Size and Resolution are the two aspects of this feature to look for when buying a camera.
Now bear in mind that the quality of your LCD matters to the camera operator while shooting, but doesn’t affect final video quality.
The quality of the recorded image is different from the quality of the image in your viewfinder. Having a quality image in your viewfinder makes shooting easier, and therefore you’re more apt to get quality shots and have more fun, but the recording mechanism of the camera is completely different from that of the viewfinder.
LCD Size refers to the size of the screen that folds out on the left side of most camcorders. It’s used for a viewfinder and for reading menus, so bigger is usually better. If you play your video back in the camera, you can watch it on this LCD, which is a somewhat like a tiny plasma TV.
LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display, the current technology used for such displays. They’re soft to the touch and work well, but are hard to see in bright light. As technology improves, they are making headway toward correcting this seeming intractable problem.
No doubt, a larger LCD screen is easier to see.
You also want to look at how many pixels are used for the display as this determines how sharp, and how much detail you will see on the LCD screen. Really fancy ones have individual brightness, contrast and color controls that are usually found via the menu.
So for both LCD size and number of pixels on the screen, higher is better.
Camcorders with the largest highest resolution LCD screens include the Sony DVD505, Sony HDR-SR1, and the Sony HDR-UX1, all with a 3.5 inch (high resolution) screen.
Thanks for reading VPT
Lorraine Grula
