HDV cam also moonlights nicely as a still camera
 

Although not as high res as a conventional still camera, frames taken directly from HDV are still very usable for web page photos. Since you're recording 60 pictures a second, you can pick out the *perfect* composition from a moving subject. Here's an example of some shots I grabbed from video out of my cheap little HC1:

http://hdvforever.com/monks/page2.htm

(The better shots start about halfway down the page.)

To get these I imported the MPEG program stream into VirtualDub Mod, used Donald Graft's smart deinterlace filter to get to 30 fps progressive, and used the built-in Bicubic resize filter to get to a square pixel resolution of 1024x576. With my simple 2GHz laptop the filter overhead was minimal, so this allowed me to pretty quickly scan frame by frame through scenes to find the perfect shot. From there I cropped the resulting frames to my taste. It was all fairly quick to get good results.

If you are trying to get the absolute perfect frame out of a higher action sequence, you would want to deinterlace to 60fps instead of 30:

http://hdvforever.com/hdv/hdrhc1/to720p

-Lorin

Those stills look nice. Not sure that everyone would agree that a $2,000 camera is "cheap" though :-)

Well, I did get lucky to pick mine up in Japan two and a half weeks ago for the equivalent of $1450. But if I need repairs done under warranty then I have to send it to someone in Japan, and all the menus are in Japanese. I decided it was worth the risk to save a few bucks. I've been wanting to learn Japanese anyway!

-Lorin