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!
15 comments:
Thanks for the review - I'm looking at this for one of my kids to begin exploring video....the review helped me a lot, thanks for taking the time to review it!
Ron
I'm looking into getting this camcorder. I know it says HD but I'm still not sure if it records in 16:9 aspect ratio. I can't find this info anywhere on any site. I assume the SD is 4:3.
I believe in the High Def mode it's 16:9 and in regular mode it's 4:3.
Hows the indoor recording? I'm looking to buy one off a friend and I've read numerous reviews giving bad marks to low light situations. How does it fair if your recording in a living room at night but with plenty of lights and lamps and such on you know normal lighting?
Thanks for the review btw great info.
As long as you have enough lights on, it's not bad. Obviously the best is outside during the day. Over Christmas I've taken a lot more inside stuff and if it's bright enough your fine, otherwise the quality goes down hill (most noticable is lines on the screen).
Hope that helps.
I just got mind and was looking to up the storage capacity, but thought it would only support up to a 4GB SD card. It would be sweet if it works for a 8GB. would you please confirm this?
I've got an 8 gig sandisk extreme II in it right now, works great. I think it's about 8 hrs of standard deff and 4 or 5 hours of high def.
Sorry for the late reply, hope you get this in time.
I've contacted Insignia about that dreadfully loud start-up sound. If you could join me in requesting that they release a firmware update that enables the user to mute the start-up sound, I and others would greatly appreciate it.
Their contact form is here:
http://www.insignia-products.com/EmailForm.aspx
Thanks if you can!
Yeah, count me in. Thanks for the info, I didn't know that was possible.
Thanks for the review. I'll probably hold off on buying one because I want one I can zoom in and out with while recording.
You CAN zoom in and out while recording but you must have the image stabilization turned OFF! It will not let you zoom if image stabilizer is on! Oh and also you can turn the light/flash on and off without gooing to the menu it's a one touch button (the right arrow) but you can't turn it on and off while your recording. I love this camera, remember your not gonna get a mercedes for the price of a hyundai but this is the best bang for your buck, period!!!
Thanks Movie about the zoom info, that will come in really handy.
where did you get this for $99, i found it on best buy for $150
The only problem I'm having with this camcorder is a serious audio delay...is anyone else having this issue? Ill view back my video and the audio is ahead of the video. Why could this be? Any idea how to fix it? I have an SD HC card 8gb.
With the audio problem, is that when playing back on a computer, hooked up to a tv or on the device itself?
I did notice on one of my computers it had an audio delay, but I have no idea why... because the other one has the exact same software setup with no delay.
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