My First DV (or camcorder of any type)

Author's Rating:

Pros: Optical stabilization, fast zoom, fine DV images with good sharpness and color balance. Firewire.

Cons: Poorly designed, easily turned on power switch. Pathetic still images.

The Bottom Line: 
The only affordable optically stabilized DV with the form factor I prefer for UW housings

Author's Review
After many decades as a nature/UW photographer I decided to try DV after seeing the results I got with a housed digital still camera's video - at just 15 fps.

I nearly always hand hold, so anything over about 6x zoom is wasted on me. Even with lower power zooms, image stabilization is needed - and 'digital' stabilization is of as much use as digital 'zoom': ie worthless in actually improving image quality. Had used Canon mechanically stabilized optics in the past, so I expected they would work well - which has proven true.

It is a solid camera - again a plus for hand holding. For me the single most important feature was the optical stablization, followed by the can shaped form factor - which allows for a more stream-lined underwater housing than with a cube camera.

Another factor, which turned out to be irrelevant, was that the still images used SD media (of which I have a large number) and I did not want to invest in yet another media type (I have 3 types now).

This was irrelevant because the still images are completely horrible. Researching this further, I find this is true of all the DV cameras I have looked at. The reason is that Digital Still Cameras use a different type of CCD than required for the best DV - so still image quality from a DV camera is equivalently bad to the DV from a still camera - good only for "memory shots".

I've had it for about 6 months and have shot about 100 hours of video. It has only failed once (not counting the times the battery went dead because the power switch got bumped on). The camera went dead, and simply would not turn off - this seemed related to having run the film to the bitter end. Removing the battery (fortunately, I was not diving when this happened) and then reinserting it solved the problem.