Sony's large electronic news gathering (ENG) cameras have an accessory shoe on the carrying handle that can support a light to shine on your subject,. They also have a power socket near the shoe for such a light so not only can the light be powered from the camera's battery, but the light can be turned on and off depending if the camera is recording or not.

When KEZI bought three brand new Sony ENG cameras for the sports crew, I got a chance to sit down and page through the manual,. These were near top-of-the-line setups with completely solid-state recording backs: they recorded on to high-speed memory sticks. No tape, no moving parts... very cool. One of the neat features they could pull with the all-digital recording was to have a 10-second ring buffer going, constantly recording. When you pressed record, it could dump the buffer before recording live, essentially capturing the 10 seconds before you pressed the button. Fantastic for capturing something you might have missed otherwise.

In the manual entry for this feature is a note reminding you that if you use the 10-second capture dump and also have a light mounted and set to turn on when you start recording, that the 10 seconds before you pressed the button to record will not be lit by the light.

That's right: even Sony can't make a camera that can look into the future and know when you'll want to record in 10 seconds.

(On the other hand, a camera that could do that would be an interesting story piece. Standing there with the camera trained on a protest but not rolling when suddenly the light comes on. You have 10 seconds to figure out what's about to happen that will be worth recording and if it might be hazardous to you...)