Which Camcorder Should I Buy?

For the past month I have been trying to decide on a new Consumer camcorder and it’s certainly not been easy, in fact I still haven’t decided 100 percent but I thought I’d write about my decision making process for those who may be interested.   So which two camcorders have I narrowed it down to and why?

The Panasonic HDC-SD700 £652.40 at Amazon
I have to admit that I have never really been attracted to any of Panasonics camcorders in the past however having seen the specification of this one I became very interested. So what features does it have? 1920×1080 50p, yes you read that correctly 50p! 28 Mbps AVCHD (which is outside of the 24Mbps specification for AVCHD) and best of all (for me at least) is the manual control of this camera, I have never seen so much manual control on a consumer HD camcorder, EVER! It has Manual Focus, White Balance, Shutter Speed, Iris and Mic Level controls, all controlled by a Lens Ring yes you also read that correctly, a Lens Ring on a consumer camcorder!  It also has Mic and Headphone jacks, this so far is my ultimate camcorder.

So all pretty positive up to this point, what are the negative points? Well for me there are a few. First off it’s the fact that this camera has a cooling fan located behind the LCD screen, Panasonic WHY did you do this? In all the sample footage I have seen from this camera so far I can hear Fan noise. The second problem has got to be the build quality, it looks and feels very cheap and I’m not sure it would survive very well in the bottom of a backpack. The third problem is only having one SDHC memory card slot making seamless relay recording impossible. Fourth problem for me is the accessory shoe, Although I’m really happy it has a standard size cold shoe it uses a stupid bracket that sits on the side of the camcorder, this can easily get lost. And finally perhaps more of a Neutral comment is that the 28Mbps and 50p can be a problem for some editing applications so the benefits may not mean much to some.

So is this the camcorder for me? No it certainly could have been if it didn’t have the cooling fan.

The Sony HDR-CX550VE £973.30 at Amazon
I briefly mentioned this camcorder in my New Sony & Canon Camcorders post back in April, it has only just become available here. And the features of the CX550V are 1920×1080 50i 24Mbps AVCHD, It has Manual Focus, White Balance, Shutter Speed, Iris & Exposure HOWEVER you can’t have manual control of Shutter Speed, Iris & Exposure at the same time which is more than a little disappointing. The manual controls are controlled via the touch screen and with a small thumb dial by the lens. It does have both Mic & Headphone jacks which are something Sony hate to include for reasons only known to them. Though seen as gimmicky by some I’m a big fan of Sony’s Nightshot feature so of course I’m glad to see it’s been included. It also has 64GB of internal solid state storage; personally I’m not too fussed about it. A nice feature though is one called Direct Copy which allows you to copy the internal memory to an external hard drive using a USB cable adaptor. Another feature worth mentioning is the built in GPS on CX550V models, this allows geo-tagging of video.

So now for the cons on this camera, as mentioned above the Manual controls are rather limited, though it does have a combination SDHC/memory stick slot, I would of liked have seen dual slots for seamless relay recording, however I admit it’s not too critical on this camcorder with it having 64GB of built in storage although another annoying thing is that the card slot is at the bottom of the camera! Sony we do use tripods you know! There are currently a lot of people complaining about a “Blue dot” problem with footage taken in the sun, this is purely a lens flare problem which can easily be solved with a lens hood, and this is to be expected on a camera with such a wide angle lens. The reason this is a problem is because Sony didn’t include a lens hood! Another inconvenience of this camera is Sony’s non standard size hot shoe; we don’t want your crap expensive accessories! So you’ll need an adaptor for this.

So is this the camcorder for me? Yes!

New Sony & Canon Camcorders

Back in September I posted Sony, What are you playing at? in which I moaned about Sony not putting external microphone jacks onto their consumer camcorders. Well it seems since I posted that blog entry, there is now a consumer Sony camcorder with both headphone and a microphone jack! I’d like to think my rant had something to do with this but I highly doubt it. Perhaps they were indeed losing sales to Canon, I know of a few people that certainly switched because of this. So what model is it? It’s the Sony HDR-CX550.

Another thing Sony have changed that I’m really happy with is they seem to slowly be moving away from their stupid propriety Memory Stick format. Yes you read that right, I have come across a few Sony products recently that accept both Memory Stick & and SDHC cards. So far I know that they have released an SDHC SxS Adaptor for the XDCAM EX Cameras and the new NXCAM range has a Universal card slot that accepts both Memory Stick & SDHC cards, as does the consumer HDR-CX550. Also after a quick look it seems a whole range of the Cyber-shot range also takes both types of media. I’m guessing they’ll have products that use both for the next few years and slowly ditch memory stick, but that’s just my personal prediction (and hopes).

What else is new from Sony in the camcorder department then? The Sony HXR-MC50, it’s just recently been announced and will likely be available in July. It’s being described as an “Ultra Compact Professional AVCHD Camcorder” but in reality it’s probably just the consumer HDR-CX550 with an included external microphone and different firmware. It’s a bit like old HVR-A1E which was a compact professional HDV camcorder. Unfortunately though from what I can make out so far from photographs from NAB the new HXR-MC50 seems to lack XLR inputs, instead using the 3.5mm Mic Jack. A few members on the forums at DVinfo.net seem to be bothered about the lack of a full size focus ring. But on such a small camera screen manual focus is difficult anyway.

So what else is new? Canon has finally gone solid state with their professional camcorders. And from the looks of things you can tell they’ve been watching the competition closely for the last couple of years because they might just have made the best solid state camcorder in existence. The Canon XF300 and XF305, they are pretty much the same camera, just the XF305 includes HD-SDI, Timecode and Genlock at a couple grand extra I would guess).

The Canon XF300 main features:

• MPEG-2 MXF recording to CF cards at up to 50Mbps (4:2:2)
• Comprehensive NLE support
• 18x wide angle Canon L-series lens
• 3 x 1/3 type Full HD Canon CMOS sensors
• 10.1 cm LCD (1.23M dots); 1.3 cm (1.55M dots) EVF
• Variable frame rates

Yes that’s right, 4:2:2 at 50Mbps, this should please the BBC! Yes its only 1/3 CMOS but apparently Canon has worked miracles with it so wait to see footage from it before looking elsewhere. I was a bit annoyed at it recording to Compact Flash cards at first, however it does make sense really, we are already starting to see 64GB and even 128GB compact flash cards on the market and yet the biggest SDHC card available is 32GB, not to mention they are a hell of a lot faster and arguably a more robust card.

It’s due for release in June and I expect Sony will be worried because on paper it’s better the XDCAM EX range. We’ll have to wait and see.

Sony NXCAM Just Announced

I have just heard about a new professional Sony camcorder, not much information has been released yet but it seems to be a solid state version of the Z5 HDV camcorder, and I’m extremely pleased to see that it records to Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo rather than the very expensive XDCAM EX cards. The format goes under the name of NXCAM, which from what I can make out seems to be a new name for their consumer AVCHD format but they have just increased the bit rate from 16Mbps to 24Mbps. It’s a product that I’m actually very excited about and I can see it being a very popular product, possibly more popular then the Sony Z1 was.

As of yet the only available information is from Sony Japan, you can view the translated page here.

EDIT1: More information here

Sony, What are you playing at?

Having not looked at camcorder technology for a good while I have to say I was extremely disappointed today when I saw Sony’s current consumer line. They have pretty much discontinued their HDV camcorders to which I’m now willing to accept, AVCHD isn’t too bad to edit now that high performance processors have come down in price. Unfortunately though it seems Sony are going back to their old ways of not putting external microphone jacks onto consumer grade camcorders.

At the time of writing there is not one Sony solid state AVCHD camcorder that gives the option of an external microphone jack, my guess is that Sony want to sell more of their silly hot shoe microphones. I highly doubt that they are doing it to sell more professional camcorders, especially with the difference in price being at least £4000 – £6000 for a professional solid state camcorder.

It’s pretty common these days for consumer grade camcorders to be used in professional production environments, you see them used in broadcast all the time, for instance there used in Mythbusters, Survivorman, Bear Grylls, Deadliest Catch and many more. Even if a production had unlimited funds it’s not always practical to use professional camcorders, they can be too big and heavy for certain applications. So it’s not unreasonable for Sony to at least produce one solid state camcorder with a microphone jack!

First of all I would like to make it clear that I have nothing against Canon, I think they make great products but I generally prefer Sony due to the NP-FH batteries and “Night Shot” mode and honestly I think Sony has a little better build quality. However I’m pretty sure Sony will be losing a lot of its current HC7 / HC9 market share to Canon’s LEGRIA HF range.

So in the off chance that someone from Sony’s R&D team are reading this, please make at least one solid state camcorder with external microphone and headphone jacks!

IdeaPad S10E & HDV Capture

A while back I posted HD Camcorders and Silly Formats in which I mentioned the HVR-DR60 & HVR-MRC1K HDD / CF recorders for HDV camcorders. Unfortunately these are very expensive units and are far out of the budget range for the average consumer. However after posting about the Lenovo S10E it suddenly occurred to me that this netbook would make an ideal direct to disk recorder with a couple upgrades and the addition of a Firewire Expresscard. Though I have not personally tried it, this netbook should be more then capable of capturing a single HDV feed.
Lenovo IdeaPad S10E £279.99
Crucial 2GB, DDR2 PC2-5300 Memory Module £19.54
Seagate ST9320421AS 320GB Momentus 7200RPM 16MB 2.5″ HDD £63.23
Belkin USB 2.0 and FireWire ExpressCard £56.33
So for a total of £419.09 you’ve got a hard disk recorder, with the bonus of a decent size preview monitor. Obviously the recording time is limited by the battery life of the netbook, though you can get additional batteries or power it externally. Also not to forget, you’ve also got a fully functional netbook out of it too.

Lenovo IdeaPad S10E Laptop

When Asus introduced the 7″ netbook back in 2007, there was much doubt from competing notebook manufacturers that there was a market for such a “toy” of a notebook. Well how wrong they were, ever since, the popularity of netbooks has been on a constant increase and now everybody’s at it. The netbook market has had huge impacts on sales of  notebook computers, especially expensive ultra portables.

Though it’s now old news I have just discovered that Lenovo has a netbook, Which i’m really pleased with since ive been a big fan of IBM & Lenovo Thinkpads. They’ve called it the Lenovo IdeaPad S10e, I’m really impressed with its features especially considering its price, at the time of writing its £279.99 from Dabs.

It main features:
Intel Atom N270
1GB of RAM (512MB + 512MB) 1.5GB Max since one is soldered.
160GB 5400rpm SATA HDD
10.1″ TFT 1024×576 Display & 1.3MP Webcam
100mb NIC
Wireless B/G
Bluetooth
ExpressCard/34 Slot
4 in 1 Card Reader (SD, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, MultiMediaCard)
Windows XP Home

My favoroute feature has to be the ExpressCard/34 expansion slot, as far as im aware the only other netbook to feature one is the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Mini. I have a bad history of snapping USB accessories off from notebook computers so prefer to go with a much stronger expresscard if possible.

Why is some flash memory so expensive?

I was looking at flash memory yesterday and was fascinated by the differing price between different flash technologies, for instance if you were to purchase a 32GB Compact Flash card, which at the time of writing is around £140 for a Sandisk branded one, yet you can get a 32GB OCZ USB flash drive for £60 or even a 64GB one for £110!I seriously doubt it’s because of the performance, there probably both roughly the same, I also doubt that it’s a physical size issue as if you’ve ever opened up a USB flash drive you will find the flash memory is smaller then a compact flash card anyway.

Is it supply and demand? Maybe, I can only speculate, but I can’t imagine the demand for large USB flash drives being as high as the demand for large Compact Flash cards that are used all around the world by professional photographers and video production companies alike.

So why do large capacity Compact Flash cards seem so behind USB Flash memory?

Sony DSC-T90 Ultra Compact Camera

It’s not that often that a manufacturer releases a product that gets me excited, the way technology is advancing nothing is coming as a surprise to me these days. However today when I came across the new Sony Cyber-shot DSC-T90 I was quite surprised with its features, the camera starts shipping mid April at a RRP of £280. It measures just W93.6xH57.2xD15mm and it features 12.1 Megapixels, 4x Optical Zoom, 720p HD Video and a 16:9 3″ LCD Screen. The bit that got me excited was the 720p 9Mbps HD video, obviously it’s not going to be the best quality video in the world but I’m sure it will out perform many AVCHD camcorders that are out there, 1280×720 9Mbps video is just outstanding for the cameras size.

Due to how compact this camera is, I would highly consider carrying it pretty much everywhere with me, as much as you say you’ve got a camera on your mobile phone, it’s crap, and always will be, the day there is a good phone camera on the market, it will be a camera with a built in phone, not a phone with a built in camera!

I’ve been a fan of Sony’s Cyber-shot cameras for years now, pretty much everyone that’s asked me for camera advice for a compact camera has gone out and bought a Sony Cyber-shot, there great value for money and very reliable.

Silly Laws – Update

A bit of an update from the previous post about modifying my Leatherman Wave multi-tool, I have decided not to go ahead with a modification because the blade is quite loose without the lock and it will end up being quite dangerous and difficult to use. I posted a thread on the Bushcraft UK Forums about what I was planning to do and plenty of people thankfully talked me out if it. You can view the thread I started here if you want to have a read.

So now what are my options? Well I could of course continue to use the Leatherman Wave for EDC regardless and hope that if stopped by a police officer he has some common sense and lets me go on my way. Or of course there is the safe option of replacing it with a non locking knife.

Since I lack confidence that most police offers have common sense I’m going to go with the safe option and eventually find something to replace the Leatherman.

Silly Laws

Ok so its personal rant time, last year I purchased a Leatherman Wave multi-tool with intent to have it as an EDC (Every Day Carry) knife, I knew that to be legal it had to be Under 3 inches, fair enough i thought, a 3 inch blade is adequate for most tasks. The Leatherman Wave is just under 3 inches, perfect knife for EDC.

Well thats what I thought anyway, I’m not one for reading news but m increasingly aware of the media talking about knife crime whilst listening to Radio 1. I decided to look up the exact law on them and then came to realise that my EDC knife was infact illegal.

Our law states that an EDC knife has to be under 3 inches, folding, and non locking. Bugger! Now why the hell does it make any difference! You could kill a person with any size blade and with a folding knife. So why can’t you have a locking one?

What our thick goverment does’t seem to understand, If somebody is going to stab someone, they dont give a shit about the law in the first place, And they have to have the will to be able to do it. It’s the person thats the problem not the blade, You could stab somone with a chop stick. Infact, I believe the majority of stabbings that occure are from a £1 kitchen knife from a supermarket.

So now I need to find a way of modifying my Leatherman to make it non-locking. I will probably update about how I do it.

Western Digital Announce 2TB Drive

Ok so just 12 days after blogging about the reliability of the Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB drive (which can be found here), Western Digital have announced their new 2TB Caviar Green drive. You can find a pretty extensive review / preview of it here at RegHardware.

I’ve had some bad experience with Western Digital in the past, but when this drive gets released at a sensible price, I may just give them another try! There has also been issues in the past with putting WD Green drives into large RAID arrays on certain controllers so it will be interesting to see if the same problems crop up with this drive.

What does the future hold for backups?

Well that’s an easy question; the answer is obviously online backup services. Or is it? With the current upload speeds on home cable & ADSL broadband connections online backup services are only practical if your producing lets say 10 – 30GB of data per month. But what about for those who are constantly generating in the region of 100GB+ per month?

I personally have 2TB of storage on various hard drives and my file server, which is constantly full, and also constantly changing. Unfortunately I’m on ADSL with just 256kbps of upload bandwidth, and to upload the current 2TB would take approximately 26 months, by which time I’d probably have easily generated another 2TB of content! So online backup in my case is just not an option. So what about external hard drives? Well to me, an external hard drive just isn’t a backup; it’s too easy to damage the drive when the time comes that you actually need it, for example dropping it.

Of course, CD / DVD / Blu-Ray and USB flash drives are out of the question either because of the quantity required or the price. So what do I use? Call me old fashioned but I’m using a SCSI LTO 1 tape drive, it was cheap (second hand) its reasonably fast at 15MB a second and each tape can hold 100GB (200GB compressed) I just simply span the data over multiple tapes. Obviously I could get an LTO4 drive which can store 800/1600GB but it also costs a lot more.

The day that online backup becomes convenient for everybody will be the day the ISP’s introduce broadband packages with a decent upload, which I don’t see happening in the UK for a long time!

The Digital DJ Is Here To Stay!

When I was into the whole mobile disco scene around 6 years ago, the Idea of a Digital DJ wasn’t very welcome by a lot of DJ’s who were using CD, MiniDisc & Vinyl. I did quite a bit of experimentation with various DJ software and hardware controllers, at which there were very few of at the time. I really enjoyed the fact that I had my entire CD collection at hand and could cue up a track in seconds and that there was no risk of scratching CDs. However most of the features such as automation and playlists I never really bothered with, I merely used the software as a glorified CD player.

Today, mostly out of boredom, I was looking at the DJ gear that’s available today, and I’m pretty impressed in how far it has actually come. For instance the Pioneer MEP-7000 CD/MP3 player with USB capabilities allowing you to plug in a hard drive or flash drive with your entire CD collection on it. That for me is enough to get me away from the computer but still have the music library advantages of traditional DJ software.

I also find it fascinating how popular the projection of music videos is becoming, with products such as the Pioneer DVJ-1000 and SVM-1000 available, It’s expensive with the DVJ costing £1500 and the SVM costing £3500, I can’t really see this taking off in the mobile scene though because you want people on the dancefloor, not sitting at tables watching music videos all night.

Looking at the range of equipment available today for the Digital DJ has got me thinking, how much longer does the CD have left?

HD Camcorders and Silly Formats

In my opinion, the most convenient HD format for both consumers and professional camcorders has to be HDV. Yes it’s a tape and requires real time capture, but It’s advantages far outweigh the competing formats for me.

AVCHD – Which either uses Mini DVD, HDD or flash memory sticks, is a very convenient format as you don’t have to capture it in real time, but when it comes to playback and editing it requires a much higher specification computer compared to HDV.

HDV – Uses MiniDV tapes and requires real time capture, however it’s easy to edit, playback and contains less compression artefacts.

So why don’t the camera manufacturers mix the best of both worlds? Record HDV to flash memory or HDD, yes Sony have the HVR-DR60 or HVR-MRC1K but these are expensive external devices designed for their professional range of camcorders. (Though the HVR-MRC1K will work with any HDV camcorder, both consumer or professional.) If you took Sony’s HDR-HC9 or Canon’s HV30 and designed them to record to Compact Flash instead of MiniDV tape, I personally think sales would improve dramatically.

Can hard drives reliably go above 1TB?

I consider Seagate to be the leading brand when it comes to hard drives, back in August 2008 when Seagate was first to roll out 1.5TB hard drives, I was expecting the likes of Western Digital and Samsung to soon follow. To this day (almost 6 months later) the only 1.5TB drive on the market is the very same Seagate drive.

The drive model is ST31500341AS, and if you search for reviews on it, there are very mixed feelings about this drive,  for instance if you look at the reviews here at Dabs.com you’ll see exactly what I mean. Seagate have also revised their 5 year warranty to 3 years to “better reflect current industry standards” Is this because of this very exact drive by any chance?

The fact that every other manufacturer seems 6 months behind Seagate really begs the question, were Seagate too optimistic with the design of this 1.5TB drive? Or did they just rush it out to beat the competition?

I was really looking forward to using this drive back in August, but for now I’m going to stick with 1TB enterprise class drives.

Windows Vista Improved?

Last year when Windows Vista was released I did what everyone else did and tried it out straight away, I much preferred the installation procedure compared to Windows XP however when the installation had finished and I got into Vista that’s when things started to go downhill, it felt slow, I absolutely hated the new start menu, not because I wasn’t used to it, more by the fact that the new layout didn’t make any sense.

The appearance was good but I’ve never really bothered with themes, even in windows XP I used the “Windows Classic” theme. So I decided to stick with the “Windows Vista Basic” theme rather then Aero. I was a bit shocked to see that Vista was using 1.5GB of RAM on a fresh install. Fair enough every edition of windows has always used more memory then the previous one but 1.5GB seemed very excessive, especially on a laptop with most only supporting 2 or 4GB of RAM.

Upon exploring the Control Panel this is where I really started to get annoyed, why the hell Microsoft have chosen to rename a lot of the control options I don’t know, it’s just going to complicate things for both consumers and professionals supporting consumers.

I proceeded to install device drivers (using vista drivers!) and Vista blue screened so many times on simple things such as printer and scanner drivers that I just proceeded without them. After a week of constantly struggling with Windows Vista I decided enough was enough and reverted back to Windows XP

So today (nearly a year later) I decided to give vista another go, things have gone a lot smoother this time, Service Pack 1 must have brought some much needed updates because having used it for a full day I haven’t had the BSOD yet.

I can actually play Half Life 2 on it this time too, so its obviously much better, that being said I still think it’s a pain in the arse to work with. Will I keep using it? Well for now yes (see below).

Over the past year I have been closely following what Apple has been up to and I have recently been considering making the move to a Mac. Obviously I won’t be able to play games on a Mac but I don’t game that much anyway, other then gaming everything else I need is available on a Mac so I will probably go with an iMac as my main workstation though at the moment I still haven’t decided.

Still No Perfect Home NAS Solution?

For the past couple of years I have been expecting the likes of Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, Icy Box etc to come out with a reasonably priced 4 drive network attached storage enclosure that actually has what people want in home NAS, it still hasn’t happened yet and it mystifies me as to why, there’s definitely a market for it.

The essential features I would want in the ideal home NAS would be:

•4 SATA drive bays

•Gigabit networking

•RAID 0, 1 & 5 as well as JBOD Support

•FAT, NTFS & EXT2/3 File System

•Friendly user interface

•Supplied without drives!

•Priced below £200, preferably around £150

Any option’s that I can find that even come close to them requirements are above the £300 mark, which is just over priced considering you can pretty much build one for half that using standard desktop PC components and an open source NAS OS such as FreeNAS.

Steve Jobs Health Rumors

Today Steve Jobs has finally revealed the truth to his health status after the hundreds of rumors varying from a slight cold to possible death, all of which affected Apples share price considerably. Steve wrote a letter today publicly sharing the real illness which can be found here.

It turns out to be a hormone imbalance which has been starving his body from the proteins needed, thus the reason he has been losing so much weight. His illness can be treated and his doctors expect a full recovery by spring.

Now the truth is in the open I would hope that the rumors will settle and Steve can get back to recovery, as for Apples shares I would expect that they will go up again, however I’m not an expert on that.

My 20th Birthday

Well today hasn’t been all that much different to any other day really, except you get birthday cards and presents, I don’t really do much for birthdays, never had have a birthday party and probably never will, not that I’m scared of getting old or anything, I’m actually pretty relieved that I’m no longer a “teen”, though sods law says I’m going to start getting asked for ID all the time now.

There’s one thing I absolutely hate about birthdays, and that’s checking my email on it, your birthday is the day you realise all the forums that you have joined over the years, they send you a happy birthday email! Now it’s a nice little gesture when you’ve joined maybe 10 or less, but when you join as many as I have you get a couple hundred. What can we call that? Happy birthday spam?

New Years Resolution

Well everyone seems to ask what my new years resolution is going to be so I came here to write that I’m not making one, however in doing so I think I’m going to change my mind and say it’s to keep this blog updated!
How often?

That I can’t say, but I’m going to at least try.

New Year, New Start

If this isn’t your first time visiting DannyGilbert.com then you might have noticed the site and previous blog is totally different. I decided to do something I never thought I would do, that being pressing the delete key on it all.

Why? Well the website was pretty bare, plenty of pages with nothing much on them, it was just a standard HTML web page which I used to manually edit and therefore I never got around to updating it. As for the blog, that was just too random, and was pretty much just like every other personal weblog out there, I also never really posted too it much purely for that reason.

Having chosen to delete the database and start fresh I want to focus more on the discussion of technology, anything from consumer electronics such as portable gadget to server and network hardware. That being said I’m sure I’ll be throwing in plenty of random thoughts and occasional rants too.

So that being said, Happy New Year!