Buy Microsoft Office Home & Student
CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 09/23/2002
- Updated on: 10/15/2002
- Released on: 03/01/2002
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 This little five-way controller lets you navigate the LCD menu; we wish there were a separate Select button. |
The five-way control button close to the 2.5-inch LCD on the other side of the camera was easier to use as we navigated menus, but we found ourselves wishing for a separate Select button.
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| Built-in memory on each of the tiny MicroMV cassettes stores a thumbnail index of your video clips. | Included accessories. |
The camera offers plenty of shooting features through the LCD menus, including picture effects, presets for shooting different types of scenes, 24-step exposure compensation, and manual focus. Built-in memory on each MicroMV cassette gives you a convenient way to locate previously recorded footage when the camera is in VCR mode; a still frame from the beginning of each recorded segment is displayed in an index of thumbnails.
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| Small buttons require a deft touch. | MicroMV cassettes are tinier than MiniDV. |
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 Input/output ports. |
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 Video quality matches that of midrange consumer MiniDV cameras. |
As we said, MicroMV differs from MiniDV at the level of the digital data stream itself, not just in physical dimensions. While MiniDV footage uses compression within each frame, MicroMV adds the frame-to-frame compression of MPEG-2, the same compression scheme used for DVD and digital satellite broadcasts. To the user, this translates into a theoretical drop in quality when compared to MiniDV, with the likeliest problem being motion artifacts, pixelated footage that occurs if your subject is moving too fast, if there are a lot of sudden color changes, and so forth. That said, we didn't notice any such problems; video quality was on a par with that of midrange consumer MiniDV cameras.
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| Low-light shots in normal (left) and low-light (right) modes. | |
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