I was looking for a good flash based camcorder to film things around the house, vacations, my dog, and random things for Youtube. While this camera produces ok image quality, it just wasn’t great. I got it at Costco (the 8gb verson, not on Amazon) for a really good price with a nice case, but it ended up going back. I will go into some of the details about it now.
I really wanted to like it, since the design of the camera itself is very nice and fairly well built. Having the 3 hour battery life and long record time is perfect for when you go on trips and may not be able to download to a computer or charge it often. The manual lens cover is also a pro to me, since you know it won’t stop working like the automatic ones can. The buttons are well placed and the menus are easy to navigate. The hand strap is ok, but could have been a bit better thought out. I do like the swivel grip, I could see that coming in handy once in a while. Now, on to what I didn’t like about it.
The video quality is my main complaint about this camera, but what can you expect from a lower end inexpensive camera. I went out and did a days worth of test filming, around the house, garden, pool, neighborhood, indoors, etc… It all looked really good on the camera’s screen, that is until I watched it on the computer. Everything was smashed down to 4:3 aspect ratio causing jagged lines throughout the video. From reading other reviews, I knew the camera wasn’t properly flagging the 16:9 videos. I installed the included “MediaShow” software that came with the camera, and downloaded the widescreen patch from their website. I opened the videos there, and re-saved them as 16:9, at that point, I could open them with any editing software(Sony Vegas in my case). The video quality was “ok” at best, but had that soft and cheap look to it. It’s fine for Youtubers, but I wanted just a little more out of a camcorder, which lead me to another camera.
When returning it to Costco, I found they had the Canon HF10 HD Camcorder for much less then it is selling anywhere else, plus it came with a memory card and nice carrying bag. I had read many good reviews about it on Amazon, so I decided to try it. It blows the Samsung away in everything from build quality (made in Japan, instead of China like the Samsung), better feel, better screen, better zoom (variable instead of fixed), the video quality is amazingly better, and the colors in the video are more vivid (CMOS instead of CCD).
Overall, this is a good beginner camera, as long as you know how to get the correct aspect ratio and aren’t expecting movie quality video. If you are looking for quality, look more into a bit more expensive HD camcorder, it’s well worth it.
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Tags: Flash Memory Camcorder, Samsung Camcorder, Samsung SMX-F34