A good SECOND camcorder
While there is much I really like about this camera its short comings prevent me from recommending it to people who want just one video camera. The problems I am experiencing deal mostly with the camera's POOR performance in medium to low light conditions. While many camcorders excel at producing images in standard room lighting this camera does a dismal job. In normal room lighting the auto focus will occasionally fail and even at the best of the times the images lack adequate saturation. The manual white balance settings improve the situation only marginally. If you are going to be shooting inside your house use another camcorder.
Now the upside - the camcorder delivers good quality images when shooting outside. Motion artifacts are occasionally detectable when objects in the scene move quickly but not annoying at all. The zoom is quite satisfying and the auto focus only lags slightly behind when quickly zooming in the 10x optical zoom range. The compact size is spectacular! The standard tripod mount socket is a welcome addition.
And of course the whole video editing experience is greatly enhanced by the direct transfer of the camera's hard drive to your editing station's hard drive. (I recommend you get a card reader or PCMCIA adapter so the camera isn't involved in the video transfer. You can be charging the camera while you are working with the saved video - something you'll do often as the battery only lasts an hour).
The saved video files have a .mod extension. The manual says you should only use the supplied software to edit/play the video files. The supplied software is from Cyberlink and it is adequate. I have found that by renaming the files to .mpg after I have copied them to my editing station I can edit/play the video files with software not supplied with the camera. Don't know if this will work in all cases but so far so good.
The still camera images are actually quite nice for a 2 mega pixel camera. They are always saved as JPEG files. I have found no option to save as a lossless TIFF. A real shame since the supplied 4GB microdrive really has enough room to store these big files.
The audio quality is excellent no complaints what so ever.
One last disappointment - the camera limits maximum file size to 4GB even if you have a compact flash card that can hold more. As a result it shall forever be impossible for this camera to record more than 60 continuous minutes using the highest quality video setting. Sure an 8GB card can hold 2 of these 60 minute recordings but something will be missed when the first file hits the 4GB wall and the recording is stopped and the camera waits for you to manually start a new recording session.
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