PJCNET

Most paranormal investigators including myself recommend Sony Camcorders. All new Sony camcorders have Super Night Shot Plus as standard which is true infra-red night vision. The problem is the standard infra-red emitter is quite poor and one can only film a couple of meters away from the lens in pitch darkness, objects beyond a couple of meters can’t be seen at all unless they are illuminated themselves, E.g distant lit up windows. I recommend you also buy an extra infra-red Emitter to help resolve this problem. I picked up a Sony emitter for £30 on Ebay, it isn’t amazing, but allows us to film about 3-5 times as far as the standard built in emitter. We really want even more IR illumination. If you really want to do the business, you can buy even bigger and better emitters including separate emitters on external stands. You can even get an Infra spotlight relatively cheap, but it’s awkward to use as it needs to move with the camcorder while filming and you can only see the beam on the camcorder screen. Remember, a night vision camcorder picks up infra-red which is invisible to the naked eye, but to the camcorder the infra-red Emitter is similar to a torch light, so it illuminates like a spot light in front of the camcorder. When filming, I tend to zoom in slightly into the spot lit area, so one can see more on the picture. Oh and I forget to mention that new Sony Camcorders have a fantastic zoom including 40x optical and 2000x digital zoom, this may not be required for paranormal investigating, but it’s a great feature for your own personal entertainment and/or filming.

The cheapest brand new Sony camcorders use digital tape which are awkward as it takes a lot longer to copy off videos to PC in order to analyse Etc. They use serial access, so one has to wait to fast forward and rewind to access different parts of the video. Although they are digital, I still personally don’t trust tapes as they are more likely to have quality problems and the tape mechanism is more prone to breakdown in the future. For a little more, you get mini DVDs which are okay, but only hold 30 minutes a disk in normal quality (around 20 minutes of higher quality) and can scratch easily. On 2 occasions out of what must be about 50, we lost our videos on a mini DVD, it seemed to record fine, but after finalising the disk so that one can watch it in any DVD player, the disk was unreadable. We tried everything to recover the disks to no avail, luckily we didn’t think we’d caught anything paranormal on these 2 occasions, but we will never know for certain as we couldn’t analyse them properly. If you do use mini DVDs, I try to use decent quality brand disks as they are less prone to scratches and data loss. If you have the money, I recommend buying a Sony Hard Drive Camcorder from around £229.99 for the Sony DCR-SR35 with a 30GB Hard Drive, see http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/product/442089/SONY-DCR-SR35 for more details. Hard drives are more convenient, you can store hours of video, you are less likely to lose your data and you can copy videos off to a PC to be analysed a lot faster. You may also wish to purchase an additional battery with a longer life than the standard battery, especially if using in allegedly haunted locations where it’s possible one could experience battery drain, see http://www.b2c-shopping.co.uk for very cheap deals.

Please click to share this article!