Express Action Sports

okay so now i don’t have a budget cause i am willing to save up. All i have ever wanted is a very good H-D camera/ video recording thing that can record all my hitting and serving in good resolutiion and quality. And when clicked once that it can have the option to take many photos. I have always wanted a good camera. No matter what the cost is does anyone recommend anything that they have used before and has been just absolutely amazing

If you want good video, use a good video capture device that can deal with fast action. This means the video needs to be low compression when stored to the media in the camcorder. In the consumer area, the lowest compression format is DV/HDV. This is typically recorded to miniDV tape, but many miniDV tape based camcorders can connect to an external flash memory device (Sony and FireStore make them) to record the same low compression DV/HDV format.

Other low compression video formats include DVCPRO/DVCPRO HD (Panasonic AG-HVX200), MXF (Canon XF300), MOV/h.264 (JVC GY-HM100 series) and DVCAM/HDCAM (Sony PDW series).

If you want to capture good still images, use a good still image capture device.

A video capture device – like a camcorder – is designed to capture video and audio. It does that well and still image capture is a "convenience feature".

A still image capture device – like a point & shoot or dSLR (or similar) camera – is designed to capture still images. They do that well and video/audio capture is a "convenience feature".

There is no single device that does both really well.

I will presume that your volleyball is the indoor sport version. I would suggest that you get the largest lens diameter and imaging chips you can afford. The poor lighting (not for you – playing, but for the camcorder) needs the large lens to allow in what little light there is available to the LARGE imaging chip. If you want to spend less than $1,000, the Canon HF S series with 58mm lens filter diameter is about as good as it gets. The $1,800 Sony HDR-FX7 would be a lot better. The $3,300 Sony HDR-FX1000 would be able to deliver the "good resolutiion and quality" you want. The Canon XHA1 will do a fine job, too.

In any case, please learn to use the white balance. It will help – a lot.

As for stills, a decent point and shoot or dSLR from Nikon, Sony or Canon will be just fine.