Is it possible to get a decent still picture from a digital camcorder?

The reason i ask is that im fed up with timers and air realeses and while thinking of a soultion today i came up with the idea of a digital camcorder that i could set-up on a tripod pointing at the unhooking mat.

Then when i catch a my 20lber i could turn the camera on, hold the fish in the usual manner for 5 seconds, whilst keeping still, then put the fish back, stop the camera and when i get home run off acouple of stills.

Can anyone confirm that this would work because they aern't cheap you know

Thanx

Lee

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Have actually done this and the results were not ideal, not withstanding all the video footage you obtain which really, really wish you had not. I even used the remote to switch on the cam as I headed towards the rods to strike. Camera was new at the time and I was playing with it....well because I could really.

Results were very poor as I filmed to tape and then transfered the still to memory card. Due to the way the image is recorded the still is of poor quality unless light levels are high.

However I would expect, having experimented with the family holiday videos, to get better results if capturing the still from the video once on the PC. But the novelty has worn off and I stick to the digital still camera now using self timer, however these can be poor and give blurred images if used in the dark with flash and you and your prize are not absolutely motionless.

Its horses for courses, video cams seem to take relatively poor stills and my still camera takes relatively poor video. What really annoyed me was that given I have a digital camcorder and a digital still camera I could not merge the two videos, one taken from the ground and the other taken from in the car on a roller coaster, on a PC from the same manufacturer and the manufactures support team confirmed this.

Probably obvious to technical folks into this sort of thing, but I like plug and play so i left it there.

some digi camcorders now have mega pixel CCDs but they dont work to that level unless you specifically take a still shot, any frame pulled from video footage is going to be of quite a low resolution

if you really want to get your pics this way. you will need a high spec camcorder, you will need at least a megapixel camera. also to really get the sharpness you will need at least a 800X600 res. im pretty sure that you will only get this from a camcorder thats saving to an SD card or a mini dv tape. normal digital camcorders that use digital or digital8 tapes record at broadcast resolution which is 640X480, this if fine but when your looking at just one frame the blur starts to show. if you are saving to a SD card just 2 mins filming at 1024X768 will set you back 32mb of space, but its well worth it. you will also need a decent video editing tool such as imovie or if your using a pc videowave 5 is quite reasonbly priced. also use something like photoshop or photoedit to sharpen the frame and remove any motion blur is always good.