I bought this little camcorder when my Canon Elura 100 had to go in for repairs. I've been in the market for a flash drive high def camcorder for a while, since I wasn't sure if I wanted to repair the canon or replace it. When I came across this little guy, I thought "who could go wrong for $99?"
Pros:
It has a nice sleek black design, very slim, with a huge 3" lcd monitor. It comes with a boat load of accessories including a HDMI cable (charger, pouch, usb cable, strap as well). The screen is huge, bright and clear. All of the buttons are pretty well laid out on the back. The hardest part is figuring out a way to hold the little guy.
The battery and card slot are enclosed on the other side of the unit. It can be a little tricky sometimes to pop the card out, so keep a longer finger nail. An 8gb card will hold about 9 hours of non-hd video and 4.5 or so hours of hd video. There is no delay in "writing" to the card, everything seems instant (sandisk 8gb ultra II).
The sound quality is great for a little camcorder, and the onboard speaker is very loud and clear for replays.
The menus are laid out nicely and it's very quick and easy to replay your videos.
The device includes some extra features - a sound recorder, motion detection (which works pretty well), still camera and flash/led light (which suck).
It starts up pretty quick, only about a couple of seconds from opening the lcd to recording, but certainly not instant.
Cons:
The digital zoom is pretty useless, and you can't zoom in and out while recording.
You have to select the focus depth (ie, macro, portrait and landscape). If your recording in macro mode, things in the distance are blurry. But if you keep it in portrait mode it seems fine.
It would be nice to have it start up silently, it will always play a loud welcome chime.
The light/flash is useless. Some people complain about having a finger over the light when holding it, but since you have to go into the menu to activate it, you'll probably hold it differently as well. But really, you won't need to bother activating it at all (carry a flash light if needed).
The camera is terrible, terrible. Don't buy this for still shots.
Not a low light performer! Most video done inside, if you don't have all the lights on and windows open would be considered low light. You get a lot of "noise" on the screen with low light and picture quality drastically reduces... but what do you expect for $99? In a well lit scene, the video performance is great!
Playing the video's back on a windows xp system took some research. The video's are in h264 avi format so you need ffdshow to play it (special thanks to doom9 forum).
No lens cap - why? This seems like an important piece.
Conclusion:
For $99... you can't go wrong. The con list might seem long, but come on, this camera is only $99, you can't expect it to be perfect. So far, I'm really happy with it. HD recording, with a HDMI cable, large and bright LCD, in a pocket sized package...awesome!
