Hitachi DZHS300A Camcorder
Hitachi DZHS300A Camcorder A Hybrid for Home Movies
June 2007 By Grant ClauserNavigating the recorded videos on the hard drive is easy. A series of thumbnails of your videos appears on the screen, and you use the directional button to highlight the one you want and press play. A dubbing button makes moving your hard drive recordings to DVD easy. Dubbing isn’t lightning fast (about 40 minutes of video took 11 minutes to dub), but it’s not bad. After dubbing you can either save the DVD to add more videos later or finalize it so it will play on your home DVD player.
The videos I made, both indoor and out looked pretty good. The camera did surprisingly well in moderately-lit indoor situations, showing a good amount of detail with limited artifacts, especially when the focus was fairly close. The .3 lux rating proved effective for low light use, resulting in only limited picture noise. When I took it outdoors on a sunny day to record kids on a backyard swing set, colors looked good, especially the green grass, but the image wasn’t as sharp when there was a lot of motion in the frame.
One thing that did stand out to me was the sound. The camera’s microphone is very sensitive, too sensitive in some cases. In one instance shooting in a kitchen, the sound of water running in the sink six feet to the side nearly overpowered the voices of the subjects directly in front of the camera. In a situation with a lot of people, such as a party, you get a cacophony of voices that may be distracting.
I like the DZHS300A for its simplicity. The idea of combining a hard drive and a DVD seemed odd at first, but when I spent some time with it, the concept made perfect sense. If you just want to make home movies without involving your PC or a separate DVD recorder, then this camera is a good choice, Personally I’d opt for the product’s bigger brother, the DZH500 ($200 more) because it’s 30GB hard drive gives you a lot more recording space. yy
Page 1 | 2
Companies Mentioned:
 |
