ABSTRACT
HDSLR cinema snuck up on us all. My first short movies were shot on the Canon L2 Hi8 mm video camera. When I was doing doctoral work at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, I enrolled in the NYU boot camp one summer, and we shot on 16 mm black and white film with no sync sound-Arriflexes that had three fixed lenses that you could rotate into position. After that, I purchased the first generation Panasonic DVX100 24P miniDV camera and shot two fiction shorts and several documentary projects. When I consulted with reporters in Spring 2008 at The Christian Science Monitor, our budget allowed only for consumer HD cameras (a mix of Panasonic and JVC tapeless cameras), and they cost around $1,200. I shot my last documentary on a Sony A1U HDV miniDV camera, a $2,200 camera, nearly the price of a Canon 5D Mark II body! And none of those cameras match the image quality of the Canon Rebel T2i for $800!
