Paco Hope

So I bought a DVD Camcorder from Hitachi. I bought the DZMV 230.

The 230 differs from the 200 only in the fact that it’s got a 1.1 Mpixel CCD instead of whatever smaller size the 200 has. I’ve got a number of thoughts on it.

Praises

• You can’t say too much about how cool it is to delete a crappy scene from your video camera. No rewinding the tape, no waiting for tape and tape heads to do their thing. Random access to the stuff you’ve just shot is way cool.
• It’s small enough and light enough for me. I’m sure some people are demanding, but I’m not. It works. It’s comfortable.
• Since I can download my video out of the camera, I just have a couple DVD-RAM disks and I just shoot, dump to disk, and erase the little DVD-RAM disk. That’s a good mode of operation for me.
• You can get the digital images out of it for free. That is, if you buy the USB cable you need, they give you the software to get digital stills out. (See below)

Gripes
There are a lot of things to gripe about.

• The little 8cm DVD-RAM disks can’t be used in any DVD-RAM drive I can find.
• The USB interface requires screwball proprietary drivers from Hitachi that only work with Windows. It’s a USB-to-SCSI setup, so theoretically it could work with a standard interface. Lots of devices use USB/SCSI interfaces, and non-Windows operating system support lots of those devices. But if you use a Mac, Linux, or FreeBSD, you won’t get this working natively.

  I use Virtual PC for Mac from Connectix. I run Win2K in the emulated PC, and the Hitachi drivers work fine. Still, this sucks as a general rule.

• The motion video requires buying crappy software from Hitachi. It’s about $189 and the only reason you need it is to decode their proprietary format. Call it the $189 hidden charge. If you never want to get your digital video out of it, then don’t pay them. (I’m investigating this. See other posts about the software and digital format.

MacOS