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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Where to buy
Hitachi DZ-GX3200A:
$499.95
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$499.95 | Yes |
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