Uploaded April 2017 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
It's been my experience that DVD camcorders are highly unreliable when compared to their tape-based predecessors. This Hitachi camcorder was and is no exception; of course, the presumed fall it sustained didn't help matters. Aside from the limitations imposed by the medium (roughly 30 minutes of recording to a disc), the MPEG-2 format used for recording video greatly hampers the quality, leading to highly compressed video that oftentimes looks worse than the bargain basement MiniDV camcorders they were supposed to replace!
It's been my experience that DVD camcorders are highly unreliable when compared to their tape-based predecessors. This Hitachi camcorder was and is no exception; of course, the presumed fall it sustained didn't help matters. Aside from the limitations imposed by the medium (roughly 30 minutes of recording to a disc), the MPEG-2 format used for recording video greatly hampers the quality, leading to highly compressed video that oftentimes looks worse than the bargain basement MiniDV camcorders they were supposed to replace!
