Point and Click with 720p Video
 

There's a bewildering array of small point and clicks with video these days and so ask for a little advice.

I'm looking for one with 720p (either 25 or 24fps), it's purely for family stuff and taking photos -- i have an Sony EX1 and dSLR but something small and convienient would get used a lot more than having to set things up properly.

Are any of them any good under standard lighting scenarios - tungsten for example?

any advice or pointers would be fantastic

cheers
paul

Most of the point and shoot cams only do 30p. The only exceptions I'm aware of are the new Panasonic TZ7 (ZS3) which will be market specific and offer 25p (well, 50p actually but it apparently just takes 25p and doubles every frame) and the Panasonic LX3 which shoots 24p.
I don't know about low light ability of either of them, but the LX3 does have a pretty large sensor for such a small cam.

I checked out LX3 videos on vimeo and it does indeed seem to have good low light images. The one shortcoming of the camera is the lack of zoom range. It is probably a great indoor camera but won't be great for sports due to the short focal length (60mm equivalent). I even watched a wedding video using the LX3 and it looked good.

I've looked at the LX3 and seems the best of a bad bunch - the compression seems pretty aggressive on it though and oversharpened.

And as John says a major drawback is a lack of 25 or 24p across most of these cameras.

I've not found footage of the TZ7 yet (as in original footage rather than recompressed for the web) and there's a casio EX-Z300 that does 720p24.

I'm still looking though. Hoping PMA will throw something up.

cheers
paul