Great Idea, Not Quite Ready for Prime Time
Written: Nov 26 '03
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Pros: Image Quality, Low Light Image quality, Easy to use (to do the actually filming).
Cons: Short Media Length (30 Minutes/better quality), Incompatible with Adobe Premiere, Sony Support Nonexistent
The Bottom Line: Great for videos you do not plan to edit. Vendor support still inadequate; a great idea not quite finished yet.
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| ahmorgan's Full Review: Sony Handycam DCR-DVD300 DVD Camcorder |
We bought this camera for the benefit of being able to take the mini DVD disc out of the camera and being able to play it immediately in a DVD player or computer. Our other objective was to use the camera to create editable video.
We returned the camera for a couple of reasons:
1) The documentation is inadequate, and there is as yet no support for these cameras on the Sony website - for example, we recorded one event in 16x9 widescreen, but then couldn't figure out how to have it play properly anywhere other than the camera's 3" screen. (To be fair, the provided sony Pixela software helped, but cut off the edges somewhat.)
2) The file format as recorded is MPEG2 - which is not conducive for use with standard video editing programs such as Adobe Premiere. (At least we could not get it to work properly - and we've worked with a number of other videos either captured from VHS video, or digital video from MiniDV cameras.) Premiere simply wouldn't open the files straight from the DVD-R or DVD-RW disc, which makes it more cumbersome than it's worth.
Still not sure what we WILL buy, however, to replace the VHS-C camera that is one it's way out. I still like the idea of the DVD camera, but we're going to wait until the concept is a bit more mature.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 1050
Recommended for: Trendsetters - Hip and Stylish Gadgets
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Epinions.com ID:
ahmorgan
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Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
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