A great camera with many wonderful features. The manual is chocked full of information, all except the most important feature: Format your disc before recording!!!! From the get-go with DVD-R, it prompted me to format the disc. But with DVD-Ram, It did not tell me to format the disc at the start. I took movies of my trip to Europe and was able to view them back through the finder/display. However, when I got to the end of the disc, I was prompted with a notice to "format the disc now" and that all video will be lost if I do format!! I couldn't believe I had to lose all my Europe footage all because I did not format the disc BEFORE I started recording. London Eye gone! Meusse-Argonne Cemetary in France gone! Hitachi could not help me. Again, great camera but Format first!!!
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.
Buy Hitachi DZMV350A MiniDVD Camcorder with 2.5" LCD and Digital Still Capability Now
My wife bought me this camera for Christmas. After experiencing video cameras for the better part of 2 decades (remember the gigantic, tv-camera-looking VHS cameras?!), I am elated that technology has come to this. So refreshingly simple, and so integral to one's peace-of-mind in knowing that the clips will endure until our sun burns-out (hope my descendants hang-on to my dear, recorded memories!). I find myself using the RAM disks more, since I can transfer the individual clips to my computer, and edit or arrange as I see fit; the -R disks are a 1-shot deal----what you tape is what you finalize at the end is what you watch on your DVD player. But even those are handy, if you want to simply move seamlessly from taking the disk out of the camera and straight into the DVD player. And even with the -R disks, you'll still get "menu chapter points" on the finished product---separated by each start and stop of the recording, and by date of the recording session. I find the quality great---even the "standard" quality (lowest setting) was great, when we recorded a gig that my band played at (low-light conditions and all). The RAM is great because you can record over and over and over---just buy 1 or 2 $20 disks, and if you transfer to computer, and thence to regular DVD disk, you don't need to buy too many additional. The only real problem has been stocking-up on some of these blank mini-disks----all the cold, unfriendly mega stores (circuit city, best buy, compUSA) always seem to be out, or low on supply. I resorted to ordering them from a company on-line.This Hitachi camcorder is truly a piece of junk. I lost the video of some of the best moments of my life thanks to Hitachi's crappy technology. the mini DVD gets corrupted very easily and the content cannot be retrieved anymore.Want Hitachi DZMV350A MiniDVD Camcorder with 2.5" LCD and Digital Still Capability Discount?
The camcorder itself is reasonably user-friendly, compact and lightweight...but BEWARE!!! The software that comes with it is absolutely worthless if your computer isn't old as dirt! And don't expect any help from Hitachi you'll never get a response from anyone. Many great memories are now going to be lost thanks to this joke of a camcorder/software package. We're going to sell this piece of junk and get a REAL camcorder from a REAL company like Sony.
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