Rating: 
Summary: The new wave
Review: While this camera has drawbacks, and it does have them, on balance, it's a good buy.I am replacing a TRV-340 (Digital 8). I had no problems with that camera, but my wife, who is technologically illiterate, could not understand the process of finding the cables and hooking the camcorder to the TV and playing the tapes, or hooking it to the computer (or standalone DVD recorder) and burning the tape to DVD to watch. So she saw this camera and liked the idea. So we spent the money, brought it home, and lo and behold, used our first DVD-RW (8 cm) disk. We recorded a few clips over a few minutes. We popped it out and put it in the small portable DVD player that we have, and sure enough it played (without finalizing). She was happy, and as a consequence, I was happy. Drawbacks: It sucks down a lot more juice than my tape camcorder. I get barely 60 minutes per 50-sized battery, according to the screen. But worse yet, 30 minutes per disk on the SP setting (around 4000 kb/s bit rate, or so...mid-DVD range, which is roughly 8000 to 2000, more or less, I haven't had time to calculate 1.4 GB over 30 minutes, yet.). Still picture capability is on disk-only, and it's only 640x480, but I prefer a still camera for special still shots, and use 5+ Megapixel for those. Disks are still expensive, but as I've seen three different companies (at least) in the store with DVD camcorders, the generics should freely flow soon. Until then, I'll use DVD-RW, burn to DVD-R by computer, and erase.
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