Help me buy new camera(s) for work

[chanaleh]

Oh, help, my shutterbug friends.

My workplace (a K-12 private school) needs me to buy two things:

(1) A starter DSLR camera that will be fast enough to capture action shots. We use crappy point-and-shoot digital ones on a daily basis, but you just can't photograph small children adequately with them. The number of priceless shots I've missed over this year is killing me.

(2) A mid-range camcorder, because the Canon FS200 that I've been using for 3+ years? I just DROPPED ON ITS HEAD and bustimacated. So, um, might as well upgrade. Do I automatically go HD? What can I get for spending, say, $600 as opposed to $300?

So, hivemind, the point is: what should I buy? I have money in my budget to invest in this equipment, but I am kind of at a loss.

Comments

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

My standard advice to anyone looking to buy a digital camera is check out the reviews at http://www.imaging-resource.com/ They have lots of good reviews (sometimes you can print the out and use them as a manual for your camera). They also have a good recommendation wizard.

Another good site is http://dpreview.com/, which has good user forums (frequently with lots of sample pictures uploaded by users).

For taking pictures of kids, some cameras have a "smile detector" and a "blink detector" (they'll take a picture when someone smiles and they'll warn you afterwards if it thinks that someone blinked). Another feature that might be useful when taking pictures of kids (or anything else that moves) is a camera that will take multiple pictures while you hold the shutter button.

Depending upon the nature of the movies you need to shoot, you might be able to use your digital camera to take HD movies (my little pocket camera takes nice HD (720P) videos in a format that is ready to be uploaded to Youtube).

[deguspice.livejournal.com]

To re-think what I said about using a digital camera to take movies, is that if you're likely to want to have one person record an event, and another person take photos of the event, you'll still need two cameras (though it might be useful to have a pair of identical cameras so you can share accessories, and training is simpler).