I have the cam but am not all that inclined as of yet with editing and playing with the video on my pc. It's my first cam, and as always with a
first the mediocre things seem good to me. For example:
I have no problem with any tape noise being picked up. Audio is fine. Nothing distracts me. However, I've read many cases of noise bothering other people. Either I have a good unit or it's good enough for me.
Low light footage won't be
good with any cam in this price range, but the low light I've played with gave me a well above average picture. The camera wasn't freaking out and never lost focus. Even at a local amusement park at night it didn't loose focus (from the top of the ferris wheel).
The audio is good and picks up noise very clear and accurate. As always, wind hampers the quality. There's nothing to protect from that.
I'll try to think of a few other things off the top of my head...
The zoom is touchy, but I'm getting used to it.
Colors are vibrant and sharp, IMO.
Slow shutter color night shot is virtually useless.
Viewfinder and LCD screen is clear.
Menus are
fairly straight forward/intuitive.
Software leaves some to be desired, from my short experience.
Touch screen is nifty and not really a problem at all.
Widescreen mode is cool on my Sony (with 16:9 compression enabled).
As for the software, I captured a 3.5 min vid for a project of my sisters. I taped it for her (I was basically the camera man
) and told her I'd edit out any rough scene transitions (which there were many.. my fault).
I captured the video fine but has slight trouble with no audio. A friend came over and helped me with that. I forget what we did to fix it, but it worked.
Anyway, with the included software I was unable to do any editing. The options were grayed out. Therefore we downloaded a free 3rd party editing program.
To keep this fairly short, I attempted to burn a V-CD three times with three different programs, including a program which is supposedly powerful for creating an mpeg from an avi with a wealth of options for decoding, or what have you.
Either V-CD format has horrible image quality (on my 27" flat screen from DVD player, anyway) or I got burned (no pun intended) all three times when trying to create a decent V-CD. The audio was excellent, considering we took no time to prepare for the film. But keep in mind it's my first cam. The audio may sound good but perhaps it's because I haven't heard any camera that's any better. :shrug:
To end this all off, this camera is excellent regarding noise pickup compared to my friend's four year old Hi8 cam.
