Robert_Charlton - 3:39 am on Feb 23, 2010 (gmt 0)

And yes, I mostly imagine myself shooting moving people at a fair distance.

This conflicts with your desire for small size/ light weight. If you're going to pan with your subjects, or hold on them with a long lens, you may need to consider a fluid-head tripod, which typically needs to be heavier than the camera.

You may think you can do this hand held, but even with image stabilization, you won't be able to... and hand held pans generally don't look very good. Also, paradoxically, the smaller and lighter the camera is, the harder it will be to hand hold (less mass => less inertia).

You could, of course, go for a very wild style... but I've seldom seen hand-held long lens shots work for even an extended sequence, unless the subject matter itself is all that counts.

If you're fussy about JPEG vs RAW (and I am too), you may not be happy with either consumer DV or with consumer MPEG.

Note that DV doesn't use motion compression, but its 4:1:1 color compression gives you an unpleasant edging effect between different color areas. You also get edging because of camera sharpening circuits, which are common in consumer cameras.

Flash memory, it should be noted, will generally make for a lighter camera. DV has got a tape transport mechanism, motors, tape heads, etc.

I've seen some superb video shot with DSLRs, but in video mode you need to lock up the mirrors, and the form factor then isn't ideal for video shooting. Also, the big Canons get pretty big. Nikon has a small DSLR that will shoot video. These do record on memory cards.