Digital Trends Reviews Panasonic DVD Camera

[Brendan Goetz]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://reviews.digitaltrends.com/review3545.html' target='_blank'>http://reviews.digitaltrends.com/review3545.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"This is the best DVD camcorder I have tested to date. I’ll try to get my hands on a Sony DCR-DVD405 or –DVD505 to give a true comparison of other high-end 2006 models. That said this one is a winner and should be high on the list of anyone who wants the convenience of DVD and three-CCD quality. If you want to give up OIS, Panasonic has the less expensive VDR-D250 for $699, also with three 800K CCDs and fewer bells and whistles (no Leica lens, no flash or built-in lens cover). If DVD-based video is singing its siren song to you, strongly consider these two."</i><br /><br /> <img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/20060501_1519121.gif" /> <br /><br />A nice camera with some nice features (image stabilization that actually WORKS, for one) but I’m just not into DVD cameras. I think they exist for people who don’t really want to learn how to edit a movie together. Editing is important. It’s what prevents things from being boring. If I’m going to watch a video of your vacation, I want it distilled down to 2 ½ minutes. The DVD medium is convenient if you just want to watch what you just shot immediately, but I would still go for a MiniDV camera, as that is pretty much the industry standard.

[jeffd]

no samples? what a crap site.

As for dvd cameras, I dunno, I'm a sucker for things that use standered every day media. I would be less interested in the fact it makes the dvds ready to play in a player and more in the fact that it uses a standered media that I can buy at any electronics store )and its cheap and rather durable) and I can load up in any modern pc or laptop for editing or viewing. DV tapes are still magnetic, tape, and generaly require the use of the camera to playback the stream to the computer and save the data on the computer first.

I was paticular bummed to hear that these direct to dvd cameras usualy lack in video quality, and the fact that its best quality setting is 9mbps tells me that the actuall cpu chip in these DV cameras have not gotten any more powerfull in the past years, but instead they just use less compression

[Jason Dunn]

...the fact that its best quality setting is 9mbps tells me that the actuall cpu chip in these DV cameras have not gotten any more powerfull in the past years, but instead they just use less compression

Less compression is GOOD - the chief knock against these cameras is that editing highly compressed MPEG2 video then saving it out again as MPEG2 results in poor quality. So ideally, the camera should compress as little as possible, retaining quality. Seems like good news to me!

[jeffd]

jason, the stunning lord of the rings Special editions are like 2-3mbps with spikes to around 5 I belive, and they may or may not be using a real time solution to achive the quality and bitrate. Standered quality dvd's are between .8 and 1.5, spikes to 2mbps. Idealy, these are 2 pass solutions and being done with very expensive hardware, and it would probably be to much to ask for it to be done on affordable consumer cameras even at thise point in time (even on todays cpus, mpeg2 encoding is still reguarded as one of the slower encode formats). But I would have expected by now that we atleast see some dvd quality (no tree shimering, no color banding) at twice normal dvd.. not 4x like we see here. But again I dunno.. is this just what I am seeing on the dvd cameras? or do all mpeg2 dv cameras follow the same results?

[Jason Dunn]

jason, the stunning lord of the rings Special editions are like 2-3mbps with spikes to around 5 I belive, and they may or may not be using a real time solution to achive the quality and bitrate.

I can absolutely, positively, and utterly guarantee that when the original digital footage was captured, it was captured in very low compression form and after editing it was exported using ultra high-end compression software and tweaked heavily by a skilled compressionist. There's just no comparing that with some wussy DSP chip on a $500 camcorder. ;-)