I spotted on Maplin’s site a special offer of a Full HD Camcorder – now after me almost buying the Toshiba one for £150, I was a little worried about buying a Lemon. The price on the site was previously £199 and now it was onoy £149.99. I did a search and came across this page and it seem to get quite a good review. I went ahead and bout the thing anyhow plus I signed up for a newsletter which saved me a further £7 off the price. Now we go onto my own little brief review of the model I had bought.
Side View
It states it takes upto 8meg SDHC Cards and from what I have read, can record about 45 Minutes onto 2 GIGS – so do the sum’s yourself on this one. It has no HDMI port but it claims to display HD – via the leads supplied. It has a lens cap and a 3″ TFT Screen. It cannot be powered via the charger but the Batteries are cheap enough to buy – £5 or $5-$10 for example.
Back View
Her we can see the back of the Camera, the wheel switches to Video, Camera and Settings. It has a USB port to connect to a computer and it is picked up as a drive letter, this is for people who may not have a card reader fitted but t is easier to whi the card out and move the files around. It cannot be used as a Webcam not matter what you do – its is only picked up as a Drive – so if you wanted to use this like a Firewire model (webcam) – then nope, this is not for you but then again, this is not what you would buy a CamCorder for right.
Grip
This is were the Battery Fits in – the NP-120 which is what Fuji use in fact for there digital camera’s – so you should find replacement / spares both easy and cheap. The camera does not swivel as I have seen some do in your hand but for this price, you would not expect this.
Front
As mentioned, it has a Lens Cap, Flash swtich (for still camera mode) and a light for use when the thing is recording movie’s but do not expect it to light up the room. It has a night Vision mode and this makes the picture lighter.
Computer in Mineral Oil from LoStBoYkEv on Vimeo.
Conclusion and thoughts
Pro’s
- Very Cheap Full HD Camcorder
- Records in H.264 MOV Format
- Light and Small
- Easy to use.
Con’s
- Cannot be used as a Webcam
- Can only run off battery
- Does not handle Low light very well
Which CamCorder you need to buy depends on many things and no one camera will fit everybody. Of Course a £800 Sony Camera is going to be better and do more and have more features but I personally do not have that kind of money to spend on something I will use only now and then. I wanted to record something, pop it into iMove and edit the results without having to re-convert it (such as some have a .MOD file) and thus loosing quality. As I will be uploading the movies to Youtube and the like – then it won’t matter as much. To compare this to say a Mini DV Cam – I would have to sit and import the movie for the total time it took to record it where as with SD Card models – its instant.
I have not had much time to really mess about with this and not sure if the Sony HC51 was a better or worse buy (The HC51 is a Mini DV Cam – tape, with Firewire).
