it’s a lot more than puddles looking fancy. it’s the entire lightning engine. like how real light will come in the window hit the wall, the floor, the grass outside, and you, bouncing off of all of that to difuse those colors and tones throughout the room and change as you move. that’s what raytracing does. without it they just have to create different color lights sources in the room to approximate that, or just create a single color light source. raytracing is infinitely less work for the devs and is infinitely better as a light engine.
the problem is the whole industry glommed onto it before hardware could handle it.
the lens is likely incompatible with newer hardware.
I would recommend looking used. you can get a few generations old micro 4/3rds camera for very cheap. let me look through options tonight when i get home and I’ll probably be able to find you something for under $200 that will shoot modern looking decent quality video.
a mic to go with it would be very important. there’s so many ways to go about that.
-you can get a cheap on cameras shotgun that will sound decent, but pick up a good amount of room noise. this will be the easiest to use option.
-you could get a lavaliere of some kind, but that takes a second to set up and will require additional tools unless you want to tether yourself to the actual camera. there’s also options that plug in to a phone, but that would require a phone with a headphone jack…
-you could get a usb stick mic to record voiceover after the fact. this would give the highest fidelity Audio bang for the buck, but is the most cumbersome to use.
additionally, a light will go very far for making things look nicer. most homes are not set to to have good video lighting at all. you can totally get away with a cheap lamp that you bounce off the wall or something. as long as you don’t have a lightbulb directly shining on you creating hard shadows.