Maximum PC video cameras RSS Feed

JVC G7-HD7 Everio Hard Drive Camcorder

Charlie White — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:59:24 -0600

With its stylish square lens hood and beautiful design, the HD7 just begs you to pick it up and start shooting. We especially like its focus ring (it’s just like what’s on pro lenses), which you can use to manually focus the lens. However, we don’t much care for the lens cover that makes you shift a lever to move it out of the way. Nor were we impressed with its optical image stabilization, which didn’t seem to do much of anything. We also didn’t care for the break in the audio between each shot when we played back output via HDMI on our HDTV.

There are lots of buttons on this baby, and we prefer its joystick navigation to any touch screen.

While this camcorder can shoot full 1920x1080i HD, its footage didn’t look as good as the video from any of the other cameras we tested. That said, this camera’s video still looked nice, and it was especially clean when scenes were bathed in bright outdoor light. But in medium light, there was noticeable noise in the shadows, and when we moved the camera or framed up moving objects, there were slight motion artifacts. Worse, even when manually white balancing, colors looked artificial to us, and the camera didn’t have enough contrast latitude, so bright objects looked blown out if there was any darkness in a scene.

While its “Full HD” 1920x1080i setting uses a proprietary variable bitrate MPEG-2, if you shoot in its 1440 HD constant bitrate mode; its files are compatible with HDV editors—making it easy to edit output. In our tests, we couldn’t see any difference between the 1920x1080i “Full HD” setting and 1440x1080i HD settings, making us prefer the more-compatible 1440 mode.

Panasonic HDC-SX5

Charlie White — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:59:24 -0600

Here’s the most versatile camcorder of the bunch, letting you record 28 minutes of its best-quality video per 3-inch DVD. If you don’t feel like dealing with discs, you can cram 80 minutes of HD footage on an 8GB SDHC flash memory card instead. If you do record to a DVD, you can pop that disc into a compatible Blu-ray player (our Sony BDP S-300 played the disc perfectly) or play the disc back directly from the camera. But the DVD format has its drawbacks—it’s slow to read when you turn on the camera, taking seven seconds from a cold start. And once you’re done shooting, unless you’re using DVD-RAM, you’ll need to finalize the disk before you can read any of the files on the computer or play them back, which takes about five minutes for each minute of footage shot.

We like the three-second preroll function that records the previous three seconds before you push the record button when you’re using an SDHC flash memory card. In bright light, this sucker cranked out images with astonishing clarity, splashing well-saturated colors all over the screen with nary a motion artifact. However, some high-contrast shots proved a challenge for the SX5, blowing out the whites while keeping the darkest objects in the frame hidden in obscurity. In medium-intensity lighting, such as indoors on a cloudy day, some mottling was visible in darker areas. These weaknesses aside, the overall quality of the SX5’s video was outstanding.

Sony Handycam HDR-SR7 Hard Drive Recorder

Charlie White — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:59:24 -0600

This Handycam felt rock solid and provided the best optical image stabilization. Its stop/start button is in the perfect place, but the zoom control is positioned right where your middle finger rests—bad idea. We like the “easy” mode, which, with the push of a button, takes care of exposure and focus for most situations.

A touch screen, as opposed to the joystick all the other cams sport, makes navigation tedious and can leave your screen a greasy mess.

The SR7’s stop button seemed to be on a half-second delay, resulting in swish pans at the end of a few shots—an annoyance we got used to after a while. Another annoyance is the cam’s use of a hard-to-find mini HDMI connector instead of the full-size HDMI port found on the other camcorders.

Getting past that, the camcorder’s performance with our video test shots was strong, with brightly lit situations displaying lifelike color and tack-sharp resolution. It did well with low and medium room light, too, and showed us the best contrast ratio of this roundup. Points of candlelight in our low-light test revealed a warm glow, rather than the noticeable streaking we encountered with the Panasonic and JVC camcorders. Except for a few slight motion artifacts that seem common to AVCHD, we liked its video quality a lot.

Panasonic HDC-SD1

Charlie White — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:59:59 -0600

The HDC-SD1 was the smallest and lightest camcorder we tested, and the easiest one to use. It offers few buttons to confuse you and no viewfinder, but wait a minute—that’s a frickin’ 3-inch viewscreen, which seems huge compared to the others’ 2.7-inchers. And it’s bright enough to show you its crispy video even on the sunniest of days. The zoom lever gives you just the right amount of speed right when you need it, and the navigational joystick is right there under your thumb. Its optical image stabilization holds those shots rock-solid unless you zoom all the way to 12x.

Less is more with that selector dial in the back and a start/stop button smartly placed in its center.

The most kick-ass characteristic of this cam is its awesome resolution, the sharpest of all the cameras we tested. But its low-light performance was a bit grainy, and its room-lit video revealed a few subtle noisy spots—nothing bad enough to fret over, however. In bright light, its autofocus impressed us with its sprightly response. Its colors were nicely saturated with auto white balance, but the camera seemed to set the video slightly on the blue side. Colors appeared more realistic when we did a manual white balance by digging into the menus.

And to think, 40 minutes of crisp, clean video fits onto that tiny 4GB SDHC flash memory card at the camera’s highest quality setting. The best news of all is the rock-bottom street price—we’ve seen this bauble selling for just north of $800. Remarkable.

Canon HV10

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:38:52 -0500

Remember the first time you used high-speed broadband? Or the first time you fired up a 3D-accelerated game? You’ll experience that same excitement the first time you plug Canon’s miniature HV10 HDV camcorder in to your 60-inch HDTV. Instead of the fuzzy YouTube-esque video you get with your current DV cam, you’ll get video that jumps to life. It’s like, well, it’s like going from standard-definition TV to high-definition TV.

The HV10 itself is an amazing feat of miniaturization and cost reduction. Four years ago, a similar-size DV cam would have set you back $300 more than what the HV10 is selling for on the street today (about $950), yet the tiny Canon features a full-HD-resolution CMOS sensor, based on the sensor’s native resolution of 1920x1080 (1080i). Granted, that’s mostly marketing fluff because even though the sensor captures at 1920x1080, the extra pixels are trimmed, so the camera can write to the lower-resolution HDV spec, which is 1440x1080. Still, that’s a hell of a lot more pixels than a standard DV’s 720x480, and it shows.

While it pushes the edge on resolution, the HV10 plays it safe with storage. Eschewing the trend toward direct to disc, hard drive, or flash RAM storage, the HV10 uses traditional MiniDV tapes and can record an hour on each tape. That’s fine by us. You can get a six-pack of tapes for $20. Tapes are also a good medium for archiving. Since they’re so cheap, you can just toss them into the safe after capturing the raw video to your PC. If your hard drive implodes, you’ll still have your memories on tape as backup.

The camcorder features a built-in 3.1-megapixel camera and integrated flash that writes images to a separate MiniSD card. The image quality is just adequate, and the flash and flash metering could use improvement. We were also bummed that you can’t shoot images while you record video. You can, however, shoot still images off the tape after the fact, although the quality isn’t particularly impressive.

Unfortunately, we had several issues with the camera. We understand the push for smaller video cameras, but the HV10 is so small we could barely operate its controls. Fortunately, Canon uses a top-quality optical stabilizer to keep the camera steady, even when you’re reaching for buttons slapped into its every crevice.

Canon also leaves out mic and headphone ports. That’s a big no-no for anyone who wants finer control over audio. It also doesn’t help that Canon placed the microphone on the rear-top of the HV10—we found that the camera picked up our breathing on occasion. D’oh! There’s also no hot shoe for auxiliary lighting (the tiny white LED is inadequate beyond a couple of feet). Additionally, the auto white-balance tended to be a bit cool under both incandescent and fluorescent lighting.

Battery life, while not great, wasn’t bad. We recorded around an hour of footage at HDV res using a combination of the foldout screen and viewfinder. Canon says recording at DV resolutions will yield slightly more time on the same battery.

That said, you can’t make a camera this small with this much technology without sacrificing some features, but the lack of mic and headphone jacks probably won’t matter to the majority of potential customers, who will treat this camera as a basic point-and-shoot. And, as always, you can extend battery life by purchasing a larger battery.

It would be better if we didn’t have these kvetches, but we think the HV10’s pluses far outweigh its minuses.

Toshiba IK-WB15A

Michael Brown — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 16:12:48 -0600

There are two types of webcams: the cheap devices used for online chats, and the expensive models used for video surveillance. Toshiba’s new IK-WB15A Network Camera falls squarely in the latter category, but it offers some features you won’t find on products costing twice as much.

A 1/4-inch, 630K-pixel, Fuji Super CCD at the heart of the IK-WB15A enables it to deliver very high-resolution streaming video—1280x960—at 7.5 frames per second, or 640x480 resolution at 30fps. Compare that to Panasonic’s $1,400 BB-HCM311A camera, which tops out at 12fps at 640x480 and drops to 320x240 to achieve 30fps.

Toshiba’s cam has a long list of other whiz-bang features, too, including motorized pan and tilt, 2.6x optical zoom, motion detection with alarm, mic input/speaker output, an SD memory-card slot, and a built-in web server. Install Toshiba’s software and you can monitor and control the camera from any networked PC or over the web.

The IK-WB15A was a breeze to set up, and it delivered remarkable results even in low-light conditions (minimum illumination requirement is just 0.18 lux). The camera is water resistant and can be used outdoors, but Toshiba recommends installing it under an eave or in some other sheltered location.

Support for IEEE 802.3af means you can rig the IK-WB15A in a location where there’s no electrical outlet; the camera can draw power over a simple Cat-5 cable. Unfortunately, Toshiba decided to include a conventional AC power supply with this camera, but not the type of “power injector” needed to take advantage of the Ethernet feature. Fortunately, you can pick up one of those for about $40.

Month Reviewed: December 2006
+ 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY: Jam-packed with features, including power over Ethernet and a CCD with awesome resolution.
- EYES WIDE SHUT: Weak optical zoom; doesn’t include an Ethernet power injector.
Verdict: 8
URL: www.toshiba.com