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This is a great little camera for the price. Although it is standard definition, the picture quality is fine for what I want to do. This camera will obviously be overlooked by a serious film maker, but I wouldn't even recommend this camera for a hobbyist if they are serious about the films they make. The reason for this is that this camera has a few quirks, and the picture quality is honestly not all that impressive. You need to have decent lighting to have decent quality. That may be a general rule of thumb, but it is more pronounced in this camera. Why then do I like it so much? Well, for the purpose that I have designated it for, it works brilliantly. I wanted a small, nice-looking camera that I could throw in my backpack or gym bag and be able to shoot little videos here and there. I also wanted an HDD camera so that I wouldn't have to mess with mini-dv's. In all honestly, mini-dv's aren't a pain to mess with at all, but with a 30 GB hdd and good compression algorithms, you can literally put hours of footage on this thing. That is a big plus. Plus, the fact that this camera has much fewer moving parts than a typical mini-dv camera is nice.. You can maybe be a little "rougher" with it and not worry about it taking much damage. (Of course you don't want to be rough with your camera, but you know what I mean). The fact that I can just plug this camera into my computer and click and drag the clips I make onto my desktop is a pretty awesome. There's no capturing.. It's just there. That really does cut down on editing time, and it makes throwing together a short clip or film quite easy. In fact, I can go a step further by simply dragging the clip directly into the NLE I am using itself (NLE = non-linear editor, such as Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas). This may seem trivial, but it is refreshing to not have to mess with capturing. There are trade-offs, however. Because this camera compresses the video to some degree, you are already losing some quality before you even take the video off of the camera and into an editor. Don't be alarmed, though; whatever loss in quality that occurs is completely irrelevant next to the other benefits of this camera, and honestly the video looks pretty good. But I'm just saying that technically there is a loss of quality due to the compression. In reality, it may look just as good as a mini-dv camera, but I haven't done any side-by-side comparisons. Again, this is really irrelevant, because if you're that concerned with video quality, you shouldn't buy this camera anyways. Another thing that could prove problematic for some people is the .mod format that this camera saves footage in. Actually, it's an mpeg-encoded file wrapped in a mod container, so simply re-naming the .mod extension to .mpg will usually allow it to work. What I recommend though is downloading a codec pack such as the k-lite mega codec pack (google it). I believe this may support .mod files and allow you to use them in players such as windows media player and NLE's. As it is currently, I can click and drag any given .mod file from my camera directly into Sony Vegas Pro 9.0 without renaming it and it works just fine. So despite the unconventional format this camera uses to save video in, it shouldn't pose any problems or discourage you from buying the camera. I didn't even get the manufacturer's software with the camera when I bought it, and I'm able to use it just fine. Just plug it in via USB and Windows will install the drivers.Read full review
I know photography better than videography, so I will relate this video camera to photography. This camera is definitely a point and shoot, not an SLR, and as such your control is limited. It does a good job and does allow a lot of control, just not as much as I would like. For example, you must go completely manual to set a custom white balance. I like the built in hard drive. The camera can store a lot! It can make a person careless in how much they shoot. One download can really slow down your computer. For this reason I really like the direct download to dvd that is available, allowing you to bypass the computer, but it requires additional equipment. The camera is small and portable and does snapshots, although not SLR quality. I am happy with the camera because the quality is good, it is portable and if you shop around, it is pretty inexpensive. I just bought my second one so we can film events from two angles and edit them together to make a more interesting video.Read full review
I decided to buy this camera on ebay because it has been given great reviews in the past, and decided to try get a deal! I love how small the camera is, it is not your typical obstrusive camcorder. It fits perfectly in the palm of your hand. The side screen also rotates and is able to lie flat against the camera with the screen on the outside. I haven't yet tried connecting to the computer, but it has USB connection and has a 30GB internal memory, with the option to put your own memory card in to expand! (30 GB gives just over 7 hours of recording). The camcorder is pretty user friendly, although I can tell from browsing through the manual that it comes with some pretty advanced features. For the beginners (like myself) there are sever different preset recording modes "snow mode" for example, that adjust the settings accordingly. You can also create your own folders and "themes" to store your recordings and keep them in order. I would definitely rate this camcorder positively, since I can't think of anything negative to say about it!Read full review
I bought my vid. camera and llloved it! The digital video quality is great! Another plus to this camera was it takes still shots and you can print out digital pics with it. It had decent video quality in low light; it even has night vision which i thought was pretty cool! I really thought the flip screen was neat too. You could completely turn it around. This feature was helpful for digital pictures of yourself. Bottom line: great vid quality and tons of neat features!
The camera is exactly what was expected plus more. There are many reasons to buy this camera, the battery life is great, it's easy to use while filming and downloading your video is simple and easy as well it has all the standard you would expect on a well made video camera such as night mode, video quality, additional light, etc and the record time is more than adequate. It is small and lightweight and because there are no tapes or disc to worry about you just pick it up and turn it on to start filming. It was money well spent.
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