After spending some time with Hitachi 's DZ-MV550A, I've seen the future of camcorders. Unlike its competitors, Hitachi isn't known for professional video equipment or photography. But it is known for disk drives, so it carved out an innovative and forward-looking niche for itself by pioneering camcorders that record directly to DVDs. The very compact DZ-MV550A is part of the fourth generation of Hitachi DVD cams.
One big appeal of a DVD camcorder is that you can pop the small (3-inch) disc out of the camera and load it into your living- room player or send it off to relatives. But you can't assume that a disc recorded on the DZ-MV550A will play on every DVD player. Besides write-once DVD-R discs, which will play on most DVD players, the Hitachi cam also records on erasable DVD-RAM discs, which only DVD-RAM recorders, a few DVD players, and computers with DVD-RAM drives can play.
Both types of 3-inch disc must be placed in a special caddy to be used in the camcorder but can easily be removed for playback elsewhere. The cam offers four recording-quality modes — Xtra (for DVD-RAM only), Fine, STD, and LPCM, ranging from 18 to 60 minutes per disc side — so you can trade off picture quality for recording time. Both disc formats, unlike tape, let you instantly jump to any segment you've recorded. But unlike DVD-R, DVD-RAM allows you to edit your recordings.
BASIC OPERATION Recording a DVD-RAM is not much different from recording on a tape-based camcorder. Recording a DVD-R is more involved because the disc must be initialized before you can record on it and also finalized before you can play it back outside the cam. The DZ-MV550A's key controls are in the customary positions, and I found it comfortable to hold and use.
Press the zoom control, and the cam provides a nice, slow, professional-looking zoom. The built-in lithium-ion battery is rated for 115 to 160 minutes of operation, depending on the recording mode and other settings.
A couple of days with the family at our summer cabin in New York 's Catskill Mountains helped me put the cam through its paces. The many subtly varied shades of green in the foliage combined with a couple of fast-moving kids challenged its MPEG-2 encoding prowess. And thanks to rain, which led to lots of indoor shooting, I also put its low-light performance to the test. You can select low-light exposure via a menu, but it gave a stroboscopic, low-frame-rate look to my indoor shots. Given moderate illumination, auto-exposure (with full frame rate) usually provided very good indoor recordings.
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I missed having a fader button and manual focus ring, though you can add fades to DVD-RAM recordings after shooting and focus manually using pushbuttons. There's also no headphone jack, and the cam lacks the FireWire (a.k.a. i.Link or IEEE 1394) in/out port you find on all MiniDV camcorders, which means you can't make a digital dub from the DZ-MV550A to another camcorder, or vice versa. There is a USB 2.0 port to transfer recordings to or from a Windows PC but no Mac support.
PLAYBACK AND EDITING Imagine showing friends a video filled with segments shot at tourist spots during a trip through Europe . They'll say, “Let's see the Eiffel Tower !” or “Show us Buckingham Palace !” With a videocassette, you'd have to figure out where on the tape those segments were. With a DVD recorded on the MV550A, you can instantly jump to a requested segment — Hitachi calls it a “scene” — by selecting the thumbnail image of its first frame. And with a DVD-RAM, you can select and rearrange for playback scenes on the same side of the disc (the recording is not affected) using the Playlist menu. Scenes can also be divided, useful for trimming unwanted footage, and you can add fade-ins, fade-outs, or wipes.
I'm an experienced video (and film) editor, yet, like most of us, I've got a pile of unedited family videotapes. Conventional editing is very time consuming. Just “capturing” the raw footage on a computer takes time, and then after you edit it, the computer has to “render” the finished production, and then you have to copy it back to tape or DVD-R. Editing may be the best aspect of DVD recording because it lets you make your home videos much more enjoyable without a lot of time or effort.
To put this in context, let me explain the routine my family has come up with for shooting and viewing home videos on MiniDV. As we near the end of shooting a segment, we'll shoot a wrap-up, typically featuring our Lenny the Lion hand puppet as “host,” saying goodbye. When we're done, we watch the tape straight through while making a copy to VHS — or DVD-R on my DVD recorder. That becomes the version my kids watch again and again, while the MiniDV “master” goes into my library.
About halfway through the first viewing, something usually appears that my wife considers embarrassing. She'll complain that I never make tapes we can copy and send to her parents. When I shoot, I do a lot of in-camera “editing,” but mistakes and embarrassing moments still creep in.
The Hitachi DZ-MV550A, however, made it easy to produce lightly edited home videos anyone could enjoy. During our first viewing of one of the Catskill Mountains videos — shot in Fine mode on DVD-RAM — I jotted notes about some shots we could eliminate. At the end, we recorded Lenny doing his usual wrap-up and an introduction teasing the upcoming action.
Afterward, I pressed the Menu button on the camcorder's remote control and got to work. I created a playlist and put Lenny's intro (the last shot) at the beginning, then selected and “moved” a total of 76 distinct scenes into the order I wanted them to follow. The whole process was easy and took only about 15 minutes.
Later that night, I simply played the edited sequence and made a DVD-R copy using the cam's analog S-video and stereo outputs. Voilà! A home video that could be sent to anyone — even Grandma! What could be quicker or simpler? The main limitations of DVD-RAM editing are that you can't draw material from different discs, or even different sides of the same disc, so with the Hitachi 's Fine mode, I had only 30 minutes of “footage” to work with.
For more ambitious editing, Hitachi provides two Windows software applications on a CD-ROM: DVD-MovieAlbumSE lets you capture the video from a disc in the camcorder through its USB port, save it to your PC's hard drive as a straight MPEG-2 file, and edit it however you like. Then you use MyDVD to convert the edited file back into DVD-R format, style titles and menus, and burn it to a blank disc in the camcorder or the PC's DVD drive.
PERFORMANCE If not done right, digital video encoding can produce visible distortions, or artifacts, like “blocking,” where parts of the image break up into a mosaic of little color squares, and “mosquito noise,” like a cloud of tiny bugs along sharp edges. I'm a big fan of MiniDV, which runs at a hefty 25 megabits per second (Mbps), and at first was skeptical of DVD camcorders, which use lower bit rates. But my experience with the Hitachi cam won me over. Its best-quality recording mode, Xtra, has a variable bit rate of 3 to 10 Mbps, but the picture and sound quality matched what I get from MiniDV. MPEG-2 is simply a more efficient data-compression scheme than DV.
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Like most camcorders these days, the DZ-MV550A can capture still images on flash-memory cards. But since its still-picture resolution is just 640 x 480 pixels, if you're interested in stills you should consider spending the extra $200 for Hitachi 's DZ-MV580A (1,280 x 960 pixels).
BOTTOM LINE The Hitachi DZ-MV550A is a cutting-edge camcorder that foreshadows the future. Inevitably, discs will replace tape. But for now, MiniDV is still the cheaper, if less cool, option. At a Wal-Mart, I saw blank double-sided DVD-RAM discs (36 minutes of Xtra-quality recording) for about $18. A blank single-sided DVD-R (30 minutes of Fine-quality recording) sold for about $8, or a couple of bucks more than a 60-minute MiniDV tape.
Hitachi loses a point or two for the cam's delayed record start and lack of a focus ring. But it's easy to use and offers excellent picture quality. Its small size and cute looks don't hurt, either. The DZ-MV550A will be most appreciated by people who'll really use its special features, like being able to edit home videos without a computer, play back any segment instantly, or record over and over on the same DVD-RAM disc.
After a few days, I also appreciated one more advantage of disc over tape: When you power up a DVD cam, you never have to worry about where you left off last time. It's always ready to record the next big thing.