Digital Camcorder, anyone?

A couple of days ago I bought myself a Samsung D305 digital camcorder - partly as an early birthday present for myself, partly out of sheer boredom :-) Well, not actually - I've been thinking of getting one for a while, and had been looking at the d305 for a couple of weeks, but I had planned to wait until my birthday to actually buy it, but I was so bored on Friday that I decided I would go and pick one up on my way home from work.

First, though, I checked that I could return it if I wasn't happy with the quality, because no matter how many reviews you read you don't really know what the movies and photos will look like until you try it out. Lucky I did, because I will be returning it.

So here's a quick review along with the reasons why it isn't for me. The d305 is pretty much the same as the d103, except that it comes with a couple of extra accessories (most importantly, an 8mb memory stick), has 20x zoom instead of 16, and can handle SD and MMC cards as well as memory sticks. It uses USB to transfer data (movies or stills) from the card to a PC, and a firewire cable to transfer movies and stills from the miniDV tape to the PC (a note to those in SA: the camera is about R500 cheaper from Incredible Connection than Game; the miniDV tapes are about R40 cheaper from Photo Connection than Incredible Connection). It doesn't come with a firewire cable, but does come with a USB cable - which impressed me, until I realized that they deliberately used a non-standard connector and that's why they supply the cable.

The camera itself is pretty cool - it's small, compact, and lightweight. The important buttons are easy to reach while you're filming (assuming you're right handed), the lcd is small but clear and the viewfinder is basically the lcd in miniature (and has a little focus adjustment knob so that you can focus the viewfinder). I found it the rocker switch for the menu a little bit awkward to use, but you get used to it as you go along. I did find it annoying that you have to open the lcd to do some things, like switch between menu and tape - in fact, this is something that I would think should be easy to do while filming, but you really do need two hands to do it. It's really easy to play from the miniDV tape onto a PC - plug in the colour coded cables, press play, and there you go.

I was fairly impressed with the video quality - there are a lot of options, like setting the exposure and white balance, but even just with everything on auto you get a pretty good picture. I filmed inside, at night, with normal 60watt lights, and the video was pretty clear, and I was quite impressed with it, considering. The night mode feature is ... I wouldn't say useless, but it isn't very useful. It's probably better than nothing, but does give everything a greenish-greyish tinge. The quality of the video looks really good on the lcd, less good on a TV, but not too bad; for ordinary home videos, it should be fine, especially when filming outside. You can take still pictures on the tape (it essentially records 7 seconds of the same image), but I didn't really assess the quality of these. Equally, I didn't download videos onto my PC via the firewire cable, as I couldn't borrow one easily and the question became academic anyway when I looked at the quality of the stills.

This is where it fell down. Video and stills can be recorded on the memory card, but both are pretty bad. Video requires a codec not supplied on the CD, which seems pretty slack. Night stills are really awful, which is understandable considering the lack of a flash. Video is pretty bad, night or day (very choppy), and day photos are just not good enough for me. I guess they're not bad, and if you're used to cellphone photos they might seem fine, but they are terribly jaggy, as if they've used a very high jpg compression (even in super-fine mode). In fact, they look a lot better when reduced to 320 x 240, which now that I mention it, kinda makes sense - they say that the camcorder can be used as a webcam, in which the res is 320x240 at 6fps, so it's as if the resolution of the digital camera side is actually 320x240 but they resize it up to 640x480, thus reducing the quality. I really don't want to have to carry around a video camera and a stills camera, so for me it's important that the stills photos are reasonable - not studio quality, at all, but even your holiday photos should be reasonablly good.

It's odd - my cellphone camera, camcorder, and digital camera can all take 640x480 stills, but the quality varies dramatically. The cellphone pictures are kinda blurry (it seems more of a focus problem), the digital camera is okay, and the camcorder is jaggy. But if you look at the specs, you can't predict that they'll be different, or how. I know very little about cameras and lenses, but it seems that there are other factors which should be listed on the specs apart from just the resolution. If I decide to try to find another camcorder in the hopes that it will have better quality stills, what do I look at? How would I know? I can't buy one of each model, take it home, try it out, take it back ... :-)