It's showtime!
The tools for home movie-making have become far more accessible and functionally more versatile. While truly broadcast-quality images are still the domain of 'prosumer' and professional video cameras
The tools for home movie-making have become far more accessible and functionally more versatile. While truly broadcast-quality images are still the domain of 'prosumer' and professional video cameras - both digital video (DV) and the ubiquitous Beta-Cam analog cameras - the range of DV cameras you will see here allow the user to make their own complete and fully edited movies boasting fancy scene transitions and digital effects that can all be added without ever transferring your clips to a VCR or PC. Most of the DV cameras tested allow the prospective home movie director to easily download all the recordings to a PC using IEEE 1394 (which goes by the Sony moniker i.LINK, and is also widely referred to as FireWire), and in some cases USB. Opening up connectivity options makes it all the more simple to have a very powerful DV setup in your home, complete with a PC editing suite like Adobe Premiere or MGI VideoWave. Built-in operating system support for FireWire is just around the corner with the likes of Windows XP, and as such, home movie-making may soon be as widespread a practice as downloading MP3s.
In conjunction with increased connectivity, the storage media for DV is also evolving. For our Labs review, we received the Hitachi DZ-MV100E DV camera, featuring optical storage in the form of a DVD-RAM disk with 2.8GB storage capacity. With optical storage, the DV camera can also double as a true PC peripheral. Plug in the camera, open up Windows Explorer and voila - the camera appears as an external drive from which you can easily cut and paste files between it and you hard disk, just as you would with any other storage drive.
This month PC Authority's Labs team has endeavoured to show you the best of what's on offer in today's consumer market. We sourced a range of mid- to high-end consumer DV cameras that come in under the price cap of $4,000. We received six cameras, ranging in price from the small and appealing Canon MV430i MC at the very affordable price of $1,899 to the innovative Hitachi model at $3,999. So, read on to get the lowdown on the DV camera that will bring out your hidden movie-making talents.
Editor: Tim Dean
Labs Manager: Ashok Zaman
Staff Writers: David Kidd
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