I decided to go for a MiniDV cam because I always wanted one and this one was extremely cheap Sony. Don't buy this one in the City though, some shops are charging €250+ for it. You get all the basics with it, power and a/v cables. Butht the firewire/ilink cable is something you'll have to get seperately. [as an aside, I can't believe Apple are killing off Firewire in favor of USB. It was the one decent thing they ever came up with themselves. Surpreior to USB in many ways in fact. I guess Apple charging PC makers a patent fee each time they supplied a Firewire port in a machine did kind of hobble its acceptence across platforms....silly old Apple.... their greed will catch up with them eventually].
A quick review in points: It's cheap but very plasticy. A fair amount of manual controls (spot meter, spot focus, manula focus etc) but no wheels so its all done via the touch-screen interface (very smooth though). Acceptable optics and zoom. Colour viewfinder (hopefully this will never be dropped from camcorders in favor of LCD screens only). Small, light, handy.... did I mention cheap! :)
Video output isn't spectatcular, that was obvious, but its still very acceptable. Given the right lighting conditions it can perform quite well. I've shot a fair bit of crappy video since getting it and I put few test shots I did with it mucking around in work one day into a little movie [I'm putting it online, you'll know it when you see it ;)]. The major weak point that I've expierienced with it is its transport mechanism. I might have just gotten a bad batch of tapes but theyres a fair amount of digital jitter and artifacts on playback. Nothing savage but once or twice I did have to recapture video a second time over the i.link to get a cleaner copy.
Nice though, and very happy with it. Small and handy, and cheap :)
1 comment:
Ah balls...
I have a DCR-TRV19 which I intend to sell and would have given you a good price...
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