Saturday, March 1, 2008

So I bought a toy today....but it's going back tomorrow

Ah, the joys of video editing.
For the past several years I've really enjoyed taking the home movies, capturing them to the computer, editing them down and then burning them off to a DVD. A great way to preserve family memories and kill off a lot of dead space you usually get when you are video taping an event. The only downside to doing that is getting the movies from the tape to the computer. That always takes forever and usually is a hard drive killer. So when I heard about all these new camcorders coming out with hard disk drives built into them, it peaked my interest. Movies right to the format I want them in for editing, taking a lot of the work out of the process. The only downside to those is the pricetag. Usually starting around $300 and going up quickly from there. So when I saw the Aiptek ISDV2.4 camcorder for $99 this past week, I decided I would pick one up to check it out. I did. It sucks.
Okay, I know I shouldn't expect a whole lot for $99, but the product website says it captures video at 720X480 in MPEG4 format, DVD quality. Sounds good. But once I got home and tried it out, I was at a loss for words. But leave it to Denise to find the right words for me. It looks like it was taken with a cell phone. And the 8 mega pixel built in camera, not much better.
There is a plus to this device. It is small and can easily fit in a pocket to carry along with you. This is the kind of device you may want to give a kid to play with or use for a neat toy. But if you are in the market for a camcorder that can do something cool with and want it to look good, then pass on this device.
Guess I'll just have to save my pennies.

2 comments:

Mika Heinonen said...

My next camcorder will be probably a Sony again, but with harddisk recording.

My current camcorder is also a Sony (TRV 33E), and the video quality is superb. The only downside with non-harddisk camcorders is that the video quality depends alone on the transfer speed of the cable connection to your PC.

So with USB the quality is quite horrible and has also smaller maximum size, while with Firefire the quality is good, and video size is DVD standard (720x480), but the real video quality is of course even better (on the miniDV tape).

With a harddisk camcorder I can get the full quality, and they don't need Firefire cables, as they are transferring the video as a AVI file and not as a realtime stream.

Ann T Quittys thoughts said...

So did you use the new camera at the party recently that the Williams family wasn't invited too???????? Yea that is right I saw those pictures in your flicker account. I see how we rate bitches.