Lately I’ve been hooked on watching YouTube daily vloggers and got inspired to try out vlogging myself. Daily vlogging is the real “reality TV”: mostly unscripted, casual and voyeuristic. Video is definitely something new for me but very appealing as a better way to preserve moments in life.
I remember when I was very young I watched The Wonder Years and the opening sequence was like a super 8 video capture of happy moments of that family. In my family video cameras never existed when I grew up so I have no videos of me as a young kid. I don’t know why that was the case, maybe it was too expensive back then, or maybe my parents were not attracted to technology as I am.
I don’t know if it came out of boredom or lack of good content on the TV or Netflix. Plus the inexpensive Google Chromecast makes it much easier to watch YouTube on the TV instead of on a computer or mobile device.
Somehow browsing YouTube I ended up stumbling with vloggers like Casey Neistat, Erick Conover, Ben Brown and Louis Cole. Their videos are inspiring to get off the couch and start having a life! Specially appealing for someone somewhat isolated working from home like me.
So being inspired and motivated, I wanted to try it out myself. I was definitely not going to walk around with my Nikon D750 all day and my current phone, the Nexus 6P, has a good camera but sucks at video stabilization. So I evaluated two options: the Sony RX100 Mark III and the Canon G7x.
These two models are the most popular for vlogging this year. They are not as expensive as a DSLR and have a very good image quality and features. They are both lightweight and robust for daily handling.
The Sony RX100 Mark III is a great camera: 20.1 megapixels, 1080/60p video, an electronic view finder and a tilting screen so you can see yourself while filming. This is a good option for taking videos and photos. It is a little bit more expensive than my second option.
The Canon G7X was the most recommended camera by many vloggers. It has 20.2 megapixels, 1080/60p video, a tilting screen, no view finder. For $100 USD less than the Sony and what I considered better video image quality, I decided to go with the G7x.
So if you want to compare both, here’s a video that helped me decide on which camera to get:
So here are some of the experiments with vlogging I’ve done. The hardest part for me is deciding if I should do videos in Spanish or English. I joined a community of people trying out vlogging for the first time and ran an experiment in English:
Then after a few days, I ran an experiment in Spanish. It would be easier to vlog in Spanish since everyone around me speaks it and interactions can be more natural:
Leave a comment below to let me know what you think about my vlogs. If you like them, subscribe to my channel for video updates. If you’re vlogging too, share your channel in the comments or recommend me good YouTube channels to checkout.
2 replies on “Got a camera for YouTube vlogging”
My coder is trying to persuade me to move to .net from PHP. I have always disliked the idea because of the expenses. But he’s tryiong none the less. I’ve been using WordPress on various websites for about a year and am worried about switching to another platform. I have heard great things about blogengine.net. Is there a way I can import all my wordpress posts into it? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I dislike .net too. What are his arguments to move you over to a license hell and pay hole? Make your decision with all arguments on the table. If your developer is pushing you without giving you good arguments, then you need to hire someone else. Surround yourself with people you can learn from, not get pushed around.
WordPress is simply the best blogging platform and an industry standard. There are many advantages to using it. PHP is an easy language to dominate, it’s easy to setup, there are millions of plugins to easily integrate any need you have, technical SEO is easy to implement, the list goes on forever.
I don’t see any advantages going to a .net platform: less support, less plugins, smaller ecosystem of coders, etc.
My advice is don’t switch.