How are professional camcorders and home camcorders different?

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There are several major differences:

Lenses are much larger in pro-grade camcorders. Imaging chips are much larger in pro-grade camcorders. These two items alone will go a long way towards improved lo-light and indoor video capture. The work-around for consumer cams, which have relatively small lenses and imaging chips in comparison, is to turn on the lights.

Many pro-grade camcorders can capture video in different ways progressive frames (rather than interlaced frames).

Most pro-grade camcorders record to DV or HDV format. Many times, this means miniDV tape, but can also mean external hard disc drive or flash memory. These are the least compressed video file storage types. This typically means miniDV tape in the consumer environment. Contrast this with very highly compressed MPEG2 or REALLY highly compressed anemic AVCHD found in consumer internal hard disc drive or flash memory camcorders… and there is the extremely high compressed VOB file format found in DVD based camcorders. Video compression = discarded video data = reduced video quality.

There there is the stability issue. If the pro-grade camcorder is not shoulder mounted, it will be mounted to a tripod, SiderBrace, camera brane, SteadyCam/GlideCam device or something else along these lines. Pretty much never just handheld.

Other features include easy to get to manual aperture, shutter speed, gain, zoom, neutral density filters, and other video impacting capabilites.

Manual audio control and audio-in connectivity do not directly impact the video quality but are standard on higher-grade camcorders.

There’s more, but this is a good start…