looking for Handycam that has infrared or night vision
 

I'm looking for a small HD Handycam that has infrared or night vision available. This is for b-roll situations.

Looking around the forums I haven't seen anything mentioned. Is there a handycam that has this feature?

I though Canon might have one.

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers,

Re: looking for Handycam that has infrared or night vision
 

Pretty much any Sony "handycam", and IIRC there were a couple Canon models that experimented with adding that feature. "Nightshot" is the Sony marketing term, if you want to search for it.

Re: looking for Handycam that has infrared or night vision
 

Thanks Dave,

I have found that the Canon XA-10 and the Canon XF100 seen to have infrared modes, I'll have a deeper look at these.

Re: looking for Handycam that has infrared or night vision
 

I do not know what the latest cameras offer but because some fabrics transmit Infrared earlier models were unfairly dubbed “X-ray” cameras. To prevent the use of the cameras in sunlight where the there was a risk of clothing becoming transparent the manufacturers introduced several features to prevent this. These features included setting the aperture to full, increasing the gain to maximum and making the shutter speed as slow as possible. From my point of view these were retrograde steps. I have had some success using cheap surveillance cameras that do no have Infrared cut filters. However they have no means of recording images and no viewfinder so their use is messy. The results can be useful if one takes care with lighting.

I would welcome the introduction of a camcorder with an Infrared setting that offers control of shutter speed, aperture and gain, let us know if you find one.

Re: looking for Handycam that has infrared or night vision
 

I have the long discontinued Panasonic AG-DVC30 which has IR capability. It's an SD video camera that records to tape.
It doesn't allow full control, but does have some of that x-ray vision (can see thru one layer of thin clothing)
in the 1/60 shutter, B&W mode, especially if using the optional IR floodlight in the SPOT setting.

The IR has 3 sub-modes:

IR -- aperture cannot be adjusted, shutter locked at 1/60, B&W (good resolution)
SUPER IR -- aperture cannot be adjusted, shutter locked at 1/4, B&W
COLOR NS -- aperture and gain can be adjusted, shutter locked at 1/4, Color, (lot of ghosting of moving objects)

I discovered the x-ray thing quite by accident while shooting some wild life footage, in a Bangkok night club on New Year's Eve.