Hitachi DZ-MV100A DVD-RAM Camrecorder - Page 7

- Performance

Let's get to the best part now... How does the Hitachi DZ-MV100A perform?

* The camera seems well built and the hand-strip will secure safely the camera in your hands.

* The weight of the camera is high enough (990gr) to make your arm tired after some time of filming. * The "Power, Eject, REC" buttons upon the back of the camera are well placed and especially the "REC" button can be accessed with your thumb.

* The viewfinder can be adjusted for your eyes; you can even remove your glasses with the proper adjustment. However the pleasure of operating the camera with the LCD screen open is unbeatable. The 3.5" TFT screen performed very well even in fast movements and the image quality is superb. Keep in mind the battery cost however before deciding to film more than 30 minutes with the LCD screen open.

* The response of the camera between pause/recording is very good (almost immediate) and the recording process doesn't have any problems.

* The big problem of the camera is filming in dark night: The camera doesn't include any night vision system which means that you will need extra light for such a propose, or else your movies will be quite "dark".

* When recording at night with static light sources, they appear with a green line on screen:

* The build-in auto settings of the camera are good for everyday use and in other cases you can select one of the 4 pre-adjusted programs.

* We had problems while trying to use the manual "FOCUS" function of the camera (image didn't clear well enough).

* The zoom button (placed on top) has good response in either quick/slow zooming. We would recommend to avoid using the digital (12-48x) zoom since the image becomes very unstable in the max zoom-in.

* When you decide to take stills be aware that the Electronic Image Stabilizer is not working. That means you have to keep the camera stable before taking any shot and you actually preview the picture before taking it (just press at the Photo button half way). The build-in flash performed very well at night shots.

* The video quality, especially at the Fine mode (704x480), seems fairly good when there isn't much action going on. The DZ-MV100A's MPEG-2 video is much more compressed than the DV format. When there is fast action, the movies have many artifacts and blocks which are easily noticeable. In good lighting, the camera produced a crisp video image, but the background is slightly noisy.

* The STND resolution (352x480) may last longer but the final result is simply not acceptable for serious use. The images have too many artifacts and blocks.

* In playback you'll hear not only the disc drive spinning clearly but also while it operates, if you don't use an external microphone. That's pretty annoying!

* The quality of the taken stills, despite the high resolution, is not very good since there is a noticeable loss of quality. If you downgrade pictures down to half size they seem ok but in full screen you will notice serious problems:

The above picture is not altered in any way from the original picture taken with the Hitachi DZ-MV100A. We only cropped a small part in order to show the quality. You can see the quality problems mainly at the blue sky.