Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Hitachi DZMV380A DVD-RAM/R Camcorder with 2.5-inch LCD, 10x Optical Zoom, and Remote Control

It's difficult to translate into suitable words how I feel about this camcorder. To set the stage, I run a software development company and consider myself extremely comfortable with technology. So I'm no amature user of video and software.





This camcorder produces fairly decent image quality in it's middle of the road resolution, but you can only fit about 30 minutes of record time on one of the min-DVD disks, if you want more time on one disk, you need to record at the lowest resolution, which is OK, but not ideal. That is somewhat disappointing, but not the biggest problem.





The REAL problem with this camcorder is the crappy software it ships with and the proprietary format Hitachi records the movie images on the DVD. You see, the movies as they are recorded on the DVD are not in a standard movie format such as MPEG that can be read into any other standard video editing device. The ONLY way you can download and view, edit, and customize your video images is by using their software...So this software requires you to first connect and download all your video from the DVD camcorder to your harddrive and convert it into the MPEG format if you want to use another program like Roxio Media Creator. This connect, convert and download can take several hours and usually, for a full DVD, requires a battery change. (It requires a battery change because the DC/AV connectivity for the camera also sucks, you can not plug the camcorder into the wall, but rather you have to plug the camcorder into the battery charger which then plugs into the wall, a real pain since you have to have all the gear at hand just to download your movies to your computer.)





After you download it of course, you now need to make sure you can create a DVD from your computer that can be read by a DVD player so you can playback your movies. Now, I know, the reason you buy a DVD camcorder is so that you can just pop out your DVDS and play them on the TV in your DVD player! The real world though is more like this, you record dozens of different times on a DVD, like with your new baby, we turn it on for 5 minutes to capture a moment, then turn it off....So ultiamtely, you want to be able to easily edit the entire video so you can create cut-aways, delete junk you recorded by accident etc, so you really want a camcorder to be easy to download and edit. This is not the model for you, and frankly, we're selling ours on EBay and buying a Sony.





FYI, Hitachi technocal support sucks. and FYI, their proprietary software that came with the unit will NOT work at all if ROXIO media creator 5.0 or higher is installed on your computer, so if you, like us, have this program, you'll find yourself spending hours trying to figure out why you can't access your DVD camcorder to download images because their software simply won't work. Total joke.





Take a pass on this one.Hitachi DZMV380A DVD-RAM/R Camcorder with 2.5-inch LCD, 10x Optical Zoom, and Remote Control

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