DC DXG-301V Digital Video Recorder/ MPEG4/ DSC/ CCD

Rating:
Summary: Inferior Camera
Review: Given to me as a gift. I would rate this camera as unusable. Audio and picture quality is extremely poor.

Rating:
Summary: Could be 3 stars
Review: I researched a lot of inexpensive tapeless cameras and bought this one from Axes for around $150. For that price, it's an OK camera. I'm a Mac user so right away there were problems with the movie files - the camera identifies as a mass storeage device so you can get the movies out of it, but they're not quite really MP4 compliant files. The're actually ASF (MS) - an MP4 variant that plays in Windows Media Player for Windows, but not for Mac. The bundled software is Win Only (which I knew) but is quirky in XP. Mplayer (from Sourceforge) will play the movie files with decent rendering, and ffmpeg (also from Sourceforge) can convert them (needs 2 passes) to real MP4 files that will import to Quick Time or iMovie if you have a G4 or better Mac. The movie quality is fair - about what you'd expect for a camera in this price. 30 fps is only available in 320 X 200 mode. VGA size captures at 15 fps so fast motion is jerkey. The still photos are good for 3.2 MPixel, but if you're still better off with a real still digital camera if that's what you're after. Invest in a set of four 2000 ma/hr rechargable batteries - it chugs alkalines like a thirsty welder swigs beer, speaking of which, for the price of a couple of bottles of Lager the folks who market this camera could have ported the Windows movie file extraction and conversion software over to Cocoa so it would run in OSX. For a cheap, very small unobtrusive tapeless video camera, this one has a nice feel and fair quality. If you're a Windows user and don't mind software that mysteriously quits or freezes once in a while, the bunlded aps are OK and there's always Media Player if you just want to watch and not edit. Mac users can get it to work if you know what you're doing with ffmpg and Mplayer (free open source apps) but it ain't easy. If you have a NTSC to DV converter, you can play the files right off the camera using the video output, but you can't get rid of the data display, so you're stuck with the battery indicator and duration timer on screen. Also the audio rendering from the NTSC output is very distorted - a result of the camera's crummy audio CODEC. Too bad, since the audio quality of the video files is actually pretty good. I travel with this camera and use it casually in my consulting work -- I wanted something I wouldn't get too upset over if it got stolen. Nonetheless, I'm saving up to buy a Fisher FVD-C1.

Rating:
Summary: Great DV Camera
Review: This is a great little camera and extremely easy to use. I took it out of the box and within an hour I was very comfortable with all the features. The video is good but you may need to edit the brightness from the viewer options to make it perfect. The stills, what can you say, it's 3 mega-pixels...very good. the 4x digital zoom was very clear. The Audio is a bit distorted on the camera but when you play it back from your pc it is crystal clear. Overall I am very pleased with this camera especially for the money invested.