Hitachi DZHS300A Camcorder

I love digital video cameras. Making and watching movies, especially of the stupid … I mean quirky things my kids do, like that time .. Well, maybe later. Anyway, as much as I like camcorders, I don’t use them a whole lot because in many ways they’re a big hassle.

Sure making the video is pretty easy to do—point the lens, press the red button—but the process of editing and getting the footage into a format I can play on my television still requires a bit of work. Look, we’re all busy. I know I can get nearly professional DVD results with pretty cheap software, but mostly I want to watch what I made within minutes of the time I made it without having to spend an hour or more editing, rendering, finalizing and burning.

So, I guess what I like most about Hitachi’s new DZHS300A camcorder is it makes the processes of shooting, editing and viewing very fast and simple. This is the first camcorder to include both a hard disc drive and a DVD drive. It also includes a slot for an SD card which can be used for recording still pictures.

So why include both a hard drive and DVD? The concept goes something like this—for standard video shooting you use the hard disc drive. It’s got more capacity (six hours in standard mode, 110 minutes in extra fine mode) than the DVD (or a miniDV tape) so you won’t need to worry so much about running out of room (you’ll have to worry a little though because the drive in this model is only 8GB). When it’s time to watch those videos or share them with other people, you dub them onto the mini DVD and watch them in your DVD player. No computer or dubbing cable required.

People who don’t want to learn a long set of instructions will find using the DZHS300A to be fairly simple. Most of the videos I made used the basic point and shoot method. Hitachi claims to have the fastest start-up time on the market, and indeed this model was ready for shooting within a second of switching it on. The 2.7-inch widescreen LCD display is bright enough to use outdoors. The LCD can also be reversed and used as a light, but then you’re forced to use the optical viewfinder, which is something most home users aren’t fond of.

Navigating the recorded videos on the hard drive is easy. A series of thumbnails of your videos appears on the screen, and you use the directional button to highlight the one you want and press play. A dubbing button makes moving your hard drive recordings to DVD easy. Dubbing isn’t lightning fast (about 40 minutes of video took 11 minutes to dub), but it’s not bad. After dubbing you can either save the DVD to add more videos later or finalize it so it will play on your home DVD player.

The videos I made, both indoor and out looked pretty good. The camera did surprisingly well in moderately-lit indoor situations, showing a good amount of detail with limited artifacts, especially when the focus was fairly close. The .3 lux rating proved effective for low light use, resulting in only limited picture noise. When I took it outdoors on a sunny day to record kids on a backyard swing set, colors looked good, especially the green grass, but the image wasn’t as sharp when there was a lot of motion in the frame.

One thing that did stand out to me was the sound. The camera’s microphone is very sensitive, too sensitive in some cases. In one instance shooting in a kitchen, the sound of water running in the sink six feet to the side nearly overpowered the voices of the subjects directly in front of the camera. In a situation with a lot of people, such as a party, you get a cacophony of voices that may be distracting.

I like the DZHS300A for its simplicity. The idea of combining a hard drive and a DVD seemed odd at first, but when I spent some time with it, the concept made perfect sense. If you just want to make home movies without involving your PC or a separate DVD recorder, then this camera is a good choice, Personally I’d opt for the product’s bigger brother, the DZH500 ($200 more) because it’s 30GB hard drive gives you a lot more recording space. yy