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Product summary
The good: Decent low-light video quality; solid battery life; in-camera editing.
The bad: Hidden touch-sensitive controls; poor auto white balance for stills.
The bottom line: Hitachi's DZ-GX3200A delivers decent video quality at a relatively inexpensive price for a DVD camcorder.
Specifications: Video input type: Camcorder; Optical zoom: 10 x; Media type: DVD-RW (8 cm), DVD+RW (8cm), DVD-R (8cm), DVD-RAM (8 cm) See full specs
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 07/13/2006
This difference in sensors ends up affecting still images more noticeably than it does video. Since it can capture only 2-megapixel stills, prints from the Hitachi DZ-3200A won't be as sharp as those from the DZ-3300A, even at standard 4x6-inch snapshot size. Video, while only slightly less sharp, is still very pleasing.
Like the DZ-GX3300A, the DZ-GX3200A carries over the design of last year's Hitachi DZ-GX20A. The downside to that is the handful of touch-sensitive buttons hidden behind the 2.7-inch wide-screen LCD. Since they're mounted flush on the camera's body, the buttons are hard to tell apart by touch alone and difficult to use while shooting. Most other controls are well placed, and the menus are intuitive and easy to navigate.
The DZ-GX3200A accepts four varieties of 3-inch DVD discs: write-once DVD-R and rewriteable DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM. It records video in MPEG-2 compression to allow 18 to 60 minutes of footage per side, depending on what quality level you choose. The camcorder packs a 1/3.6-inch, 2.1-megapixel CCD sensor. Though it uses 2 megapixels to capture stills, it uses only 1.2 megapixels for video.
Other features include a 10X optical zoom lens, automatic and manual white balance and exposure options, as well as five preprogrammed autoexposure modes and three preset white-balance settings. Connectivity includes an A/V input/output jack, a microphone input, and a mini USB jack. There's no FireWire output, but most users will probably just drop the mini-DVD disc in their computer's DVD drive to transfer their footage. However, if you have a slot-loading DVD drive, the USB connection will definitely come in handy.
Performance was almost identical to the DZ-GX3300A's, with a speedy start-up, comfortable zoom control, and adequately responsive autofocus. The electronic image stabilization was effective to about 74 percent of the camera's zoom range, and manual focus was difficult on the LCD screen.
The one area in which the Hitachi DZ-GX3200A exceeds the DZ-GX3300A is battery life. Hitachi rates the DZ-GX3200A's battery life at as much as 125 minutes when using the best recording quality, though you can expect about half that with typical start/stop recording and occasional replay of scenes you've shot.
The DZ-GX3200A's video quality is about what you'd expect from a midprice MiniDV camcorder. At low compression, video was sharp with some motion artifacts and edge crawl, along with a bit of blooming. At higher compression levels, banding showed up more often in areas with significant gradations in brightness.
Low-light footage exhibited more grain than well-lit scenes did, though the DZ-GX3200A yielded pleasing low-light video that was brighter and more colorful than one might expect at this price. The low-light mode helped to brighten dim scenes, though it does noticeably lower the frame rate, so moving objects and pans look a bit choppy.
Still images were impressive for a camcorder, though the auto white balance produced extremely warm results with our lab's tungsten lights. The tungsten white-balance mode worked better, but we had to set white balance manually to get truly neutral results.
If you're looking for a relatively inexpensive DVD camcorder and don't need the DZ-GX3300A's 3-megapixel stills, the Hitachi DZ-GX3200A might be for you. Of course, if you don't care much about stills and can sacrifice a little bit of sharpness in your video, then you may want to take a look at this camcorder's less-expensive sibling, the Hitachi DZ-GX3100A.
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