Hitachis DZ-MV100A (reviewed July 2001, page 90) was a revolution in digital video camera technology, albeit one that sparked and fizzled. It was the first (and only) DV camera in the world to record direct to DVD (and even won a technical Emmy for this), but its usage was limited because it could only record to DVD-RAM, excluding disc playback from most standalone DVD players. It was a good camera but prohibitively expensive compared to DV tape cameras, and unfortunately it rated better as a proof of concept.

Hitachi has taken the lessons learnt with that camera and recently released the next three successors: the DZ-MV238E, the DZ-MV270E, and this review model, the DZ-MV208E. This is the entry-level camera of the three, and while it doesnt offer the higher-end features of the other two models, it still demonstrates that $2,199 can net you a very decent DV camera (at almost half the price of the DZ-MV100A when it was released).

Its a 800,000-pixel (0.8-megapixel) camera, which is nowhere near the resolution offered on most entry-level cameras, but the main innovation of the DZ-MV208E is that it not only records to DVD-RAM (Redbook standard 2.1) but that it can also record direct to DVD-R. The latter is a write-once format, which means youve got to be an ace camera-person as you only get the one shot and you negate the ability to perform any in-camera editing (more below). On the other hand, its also a component-friendly format so anything burnt on the DVD-R should be replayable on any normal standalone DVD player.

An advantage of filming to DVD is that you cannot accidentally re-record over previous footage or photos, unless (in the case of DVD-RAM), you deliberately delete the footage first.

The DZ-MV208E writes to 8cm discs, not 12cm, which keeps the cameras form factor small and lightweight. On a double-sided DVD-RAM disc, using both sides, you can film from 60 to 120 minutes of video (depending on which quality setting you use), or take up to 1,998 still photos at 1,024 x 768.

With a single sided DVD-R disc you can record 30 minutes of high quality video or 60 minutes of standard quality, but you cant record stills on this media. The camera comes bundled with one DVD-R and one single-sided DVD-RAM disc (so halve the above DVD-RAM times/capacities).

DVD-RAM offers the most functionality on the DZ-MV208E, despite its incompatibility with DVD players, as the in-camera editing available with the format is superb. You can edit, cut, and splice video, as well as insert transition effects, audio, text and video overlays, and re-order clips all in-camera.

An optional PC Editing Kit is available, which includes USB 1.1 and UDF drivers for Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP, plus Ulead PhotoExplorer 7 Lite, PowerDVD XP 4.0 and Ulead DVD Movie Factory. This kit is recommended as it lets you download your video from the camera, further edit on the PC and then upload back to the camera to burn permanently to DVD-R.

If you are thinking about using your PC to edit, you might be put off by the cameras support for USB 1.1 not USB 2.0 or FireWire. However, unlike normal cameras that require you to copy huge chunks of un-encoded DV to the PC and need the speed of FireWire, the DZ-MV208E encodes video to MPEG-2 on the fly as it is filmed, so the file sizes are smaller. Having said that, a single side of a DVD-RAM disc holds 1.4GB, so youre still looking at a bit of idle time.

While the Hitachi DVD cameras have improved in quality since their inception, there is still room for improvement: 0.8-megapixels is not an astounding resolution, but it is slightly enhanced by the 12x manual zoom (+240x digital); however, for direct playback, in-camera editing and functionality, the DZ-MV208E is hard to beat.