Wide Angle
Do I need a wide angle lense for my prosumer camcorder?
I am looking at prosumer camcorders from sony, canon, jvc, red, panasonic, and any other I can find.
Do some brands have wider angles then others?
To make movies and documentaries do you have to film in wide angle? I mean I will be doing it in HD and aren't all films and tv's formatted mainly to widescreen nowadays? Is wide angle the same as wide screen?
Do I need a wide angle lens or is stock wide enough?
Wide angle lenses and wide screen (16:9) aspect ratio are mutually exclusive.
If the camcorder's field of view does not capture enough of a space - and you cannot pull the camera back any more - then use of a wide angle lens can increase the camera's field of view. There is a building going up in my city. From across the street, the entire width of the building won't fit in my camera's field of view - by using a 0.7x wide angle lens add-on, nearly the entire width of the construction project fits so I can pretty much eliminate having to pan the camera. When you have a wider angle, the more distortion you will notice on the captured video. At the extreme, there are fisheye lenses commonly used for skateboard videos... These will be in the 0.3x or 0.4x range.
The opposite will be use of a tele-lens. I occasionaly use a 2x tele lens when the built-in optical zoom is not enough to zoom into what I want.
If you are capturing high definition video, that, by definition is widescreen. All that means is the aspect ration is 16:9 rather than the more square 4:3 or older standard definition televisions.
Whether you need/want a wide angle lense will depend on the shot you are trying to achieve.