- Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 4 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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0.5 stars
"Very poor product"
Pros: Love the video discs so I can go on long vacations!
Cons: Hmmm, let me list under details - too many problems.
Summary: 1. There is no way to "light" a subject under dark light conditions. OK, you can turn around the viewing screen during video, but this does not cast nearly enough light to be useful. My old Sony, 10 years ago, did a better job of lighting than this.
2. Since there is no light source under low light conditions, the Hitachi cannot focus on the subject.
3. The software provided to unload videos clips from the camera fails about 15% of the time. This is really not acceptable if 15% means you lost all of your pictures of Cyprus. I've taken about 150 hours of video over the last year, and I throw out about 1 video disc out of every 6 because the Hitachi cannot recover the contents (see below).
4. The camera HATES humidity and temperature (see their manual). You can take the video, but when you get home you can't recover the video on the discs. My estimate is that the recording range goes only to about 90 degrees F before intermitant failures take over.
5. If there is ANY failure on a disc, you can't recover anything from that side of the disc. That's why I keep throwing away the discs. There is no ability to say, "OK, I know you had trouble reading that clip I took when it was rainy, but please recover the rest for me." If ONE clip on disc is bad, you can't recover anything else from that side of the disc (about 30 minutes worth, in my case).
If you are shooting video in real life (on vacation, around a barbeque, in the South Pacific), Don't Buy This VideoCamera!!!
Editors: before you delete my comments, I suggest you try using this camera in the conditions I have suggested. Oh, by the way, shooting 10 hours of video is not enough to uncover these problems. Do take a vacation with your children and record 20 hours of video before you delete my comments. I'd show you my vacation in Italy with my children, but I'm missing about 4 hours of the 15 hours I shot because the software could not recover if there was one bad file on a disc.
This camera performs at about the 20% level compared with my old Sony.
Regards, John Brabson
Where to buy
Hitachi DZ-HS300A:
$299.95
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$299.95 | Yes |
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