digital minidv

Not only did this camera exceed my expectations, but after shopping around, got it for a great price. The zoom and DIS are excellent, and the power nite pix is really cool. Pictures onto the memory stick aren't anything special, but I wasn't buying a camcorder to take pictures anyway. The size is very manageable, and hooking it up via the USB was a snap. The menus become easy to use after you get use to them, and some of the 'quick' buttons let you access functions even faster. The cassette insertion is actually pretty neat, and assuming you're not retarded, you shouldn't have a problem.

My husband and I purchased this Camcorder and recorded our sons birth, which worked fine for the taping, but when we played it back the camera would not rewind and when we played it on the TV there was nothing but lines through the picture. We sent the tape to Samsung who said the tape could not be recovered and the camera was "off line" and could not be fixed. The tape of our sons birth is now bascially worthless. So we returned the camcorder and purchased another one just like it. It worked for 2 months and now when you play back the tape, the picture is all encrypted and the sound is nothing but static! Samsung camcorders are junk!!!

The video quality is terrible~ in natural daylight indoors the images are grainy, dark, and the colors are inaccurate. I was filming my kids and my daughter's bright pink ball came out orange in the film. The images were not clear at all and everything appeared darker than to the eye. I have gotten MUCH better results from my old RCA vhs recorder than this digital one. In outdoors, at 1pm, I got similar disappointing results~ the colors of the trees were not captured and again, the images were darker than in real life. Very disappointing.

I'm giving this camcorder 2 stars (rather than none) because it does have very good sound quality and it was easy to use. However, because I want decent recordings of my children, this is going back to the store today.