Hitachi DZ-MV380A Best Price, Reviews, Compare
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I have had this model for a month now and am blissful with the performance. Recording with DVD-RAM is a snap and editing is unbiased as easy. I have a ... Panasonic dvd player s-31 and I can plop the DVD-RAM directly from the camcorder into the dvd player and gaze my movies and opinion my photos. My first generation JVC DVD player spits the disc out and swears at me in Japanese.
It comes with sonic MyDvd which makes heavenly decent DVDs. It also comes with a program that can convert the camcorder files into Mpeg files. Once they are mpeg files you can exercise them in any decent video editing software. I usually edit the video files and then utilize Sonic to burn a DVD. I have not tried VCD and considering the dreadful quality of a VCD, I don't know why someone would want to.
As far as video quality, I former it to tape my daughter surfing and the quality was honorable. The optical zoom is expansive but the digital zoom pixilates heavily at anything higher than 40x. I have tested the different recording formats (std, lovely and xtra) and I now only exhaust the highest format as the other ones reveal up with scanning lines on my 40 poke TV. In auto mode it sucks at extreme light...until I manually situation it to grievous light mode and everything showed up but had a brownish hue.
The media is aloof more expensive than DV tapes... At highest quality a single DVD-RAM holds a half an hour (15 min each side) . I have not tried the DVD-R as I am having a hard time justifying spending [the money] to represent to a disk and not be able to do any post editing. The discs are nice as each time I turn the picture on and off it creates a exiguous movie that is accessed grand like a scene menu on a regular DVD. On a DVD-RAM, I can then edit it, add transition effects or I can delete it. No more rewinding tape. Let me write that again - no more rewinding tape. That has to be the nicest thing about this toy - no more tape.
It only has a USB connection - no fire wire. I am running XP and connection to the computer was a snap.
It takes 1 mega pixel photos which are the quality of, well, 1 mega pixel photos. I have an mature 2.5 mega pixel Olympus that obviously blows it away but in a pinch it makes decent limited pics.
Would I acquire this again? Yes. So far the overall quality is on par with its peers and not having to muck with tape is a substantial back for me. It loses 1 star for the media recording length and designate of the DVD discs.
This camcorder is what many have waited for: consumer grade digital video without tape. The decision to exhaust mainly DVD-R or DVD-RAM is best made early. For me, DVD-R is composed too expensive to employ. DVD-RAM allows reuse, as well as in-camera editing. But don't be fooled by this editing capability, this camera would be extremely frustrating without a computer for offline processing...
Which brings us to the bundled software. As a Mac user, and lustrous that video is unexcited very Mac-friendly, the Windows-only software was a grave disappointment. Even within the Windows environment, this software is unruffled quite clumsy. The DVD-RAM disks require drivers to read (Included Windows drivers seem to work well) . The video files are *.VRO, which is an MPEG-2 variant many decoders cannot parse, including QuickTime.
Still the bundled software allows rudimentary DVD editing and some degree of MPEG transcoding. For serious offline editing, you'll need an expensive suite of software and a trustworthy computer.
Despite its software limitations, this camera is an gracious method for capturing source material. Its three DVD-RAM resolution modes, STD/FINE/EXTRA provide a useful space of tradeoffs. Don't consume the STD mode unless 60 dinky continuity is indispensable. My 4 megapixel serene camera means its unlikely I'll ever know how well the DZMV-380A operates in composed mode.
In short, if you're serious about DVD dispute creation and have the computer tools and expertise, this camera is second to none. But the casual user will be disappointed at the expense of DVD-R disks and the complexity of using DVD-RAM.
A Five-Star camera bundled with Two-Star software. Four stars.
It's difficult to translate into excellent words how I feel about this camcorder. To place the stage, I speed a software development company and contemplate 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 recount time on one of the min-DVD disks, if you want more time on one disk, you need to represent at the lowest resolution, which is OK, but not ideal. That is somewhat disappointing, but not the biggest plight.
The Valid scrape with this camcorder is the crappy software it ships with and the proprietary format Hitachi records the movie images on the DVD. You glance, 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 arrangement. The ONLY diagram you can download and notion, 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 utilize another program like Roxio Media Creator. This connect, convert and download can assume several hours and usually, for a beefy DVD, requires a battery change. (It requires a battery change because the DC/AV connectivity for the camera also sucks, you can not dart the camcorder into the wall, but rather you have to meander the camcorder into the battery charger which then plugs into the wall, a dependable damage since you have to have all the gear at hand fair to download your movies to your computer.)
After you download it of course, you now need to effect certain you can develop 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 purchase a DVD camcorder is so that you can unprejudiced pop out your DVDS and play them on the TV in your DVD player! The exact world though is more like this, you describe dozens of different times on a DVD, like with your unusual baby, we turn it on for 5 minutes to prefer a moment, then turn it off....So ultiamtely, you want to be able to easily edit the entire video so you can fabricate 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 aid 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 collect 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.
