Good Value

Author's Rating:

Pros: Broadcast TV-Like Picture Quality. Excellent Color Rendition. Perfect compatibility with Mac OSX.

Cons: Low light/Indoor Performance & Picture Quality.

The Bottom Line: 
Great 1st Camera for getting started in movie making/home family video. Picture Quality & Color Saturation will rival more expensive 3 CCD Camcorders.

Author's Review
I purchased this Camera on impulse at a large electronics superstore.

This camera is very is compact, made of high quality materials, and has a very good build quality.

The camera has several functions, including built in editing features (including transitions effects) that most people will probably not use, as you will use your computer (preferably a Mac w/ iMovie) to edit the video and create your movie.

Most importantly, the picture quality from this single CCD low priced DV Camcorder is amazing. Obviously DVD quality. The color saturation, (even the reds, which often cause single CCD camcorders problems) is excellent. The Sharpness and clarity is surprisingly excellent. I often compare the picture quality to Local News Broadcast Cameras which I'm sure cost several thousand dollars.

The Zoom ia 10x optical and up to 700x Digital. The digital zoom is really only usefull of to about 25x, after which it becomes far too pixelated. 25x zoom is very handy and impressive, for such a small camcorder.

When viewing my video footage on a low quality 19" television, I did notice that distant objects/terrain are not super sharp, although the sharpness is very reasonable. I noticed only because I was looking very closely attempting to find flaws in the picture quality of this camera. The lack of super sharpness I noticed may have been a result of the $150 19" wallmart television I was viewing the footage with. Even so, the sharpness was not dissapointing, and probably not noticable to the average viewer.

The Camera has both USB & Firewire (ilink/ieee1034) interfaces. It interfaced perfectly with my PowerMac running OS X 10.3 w/ iMovie. The computer could control the camcorder perfectly via the firewire connection. If you are looking to edit video with a computer, forget PC, go MAC.

The LCD viewfinder is very high quality, bright, and sharp. It also has an eyepiece viewfinder that displays the video in color, although it isn't as sharp. No problem though,, as you'll allways use the LCD screen.

Battery life is an impressive 1 hour or so. Long enough for one DVC tape worth of recording.

Low light indoor picture quality may be more grainy and of lesser quality then more expensive cameras. You will need to ensure adaquate bright lighting when filming indoors.

I highly recommend this camera. It is a great value. If you film indoors often, and can't ensure adaquate lighting, you may want to consider a camera with a larger CCD, but otherwise, this is an excellent choice. I see no reason to pay any more for a single CCD camera.