If anyone's in the market for a high def camcorder at the moment and doesn't have much to spend, I'd like to recommend the Hitachi HV656E. It does 1080p at 30fps and gives pretty good picture quality, has 5x optical zoom, face detection, manual settings, macro mode and LED video light.

Picked it up for £117 from Argos this afternoon after a fruitless search for a Toshiba Camileo H20. As far as I'm aware, the only difference is the form factor and the Hitachi is £40 cheaper.



Sample video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v ... tAxk0&feature=related

In the US, this is sold as the Sanyo HD100 in Walmart.

I don't work for anyone related to this camera btw, it's purely a "hey, look what I found!"

I've recently bought a Samsung Full HD videocam for 600€. 8GB internal memory, touch screen etc... very good

Ooo nice find TiJay... I've been thinking about getting myself a HD camcorder recently for some Vlogging, and I was looking at buying the Camileo S10, looks like my mind has just been changed

TiJay - Could you record some proper footage please?

Anything really as long as it's not on YouTube, just to get an idea of "true quality".

DVD quality is better than internal HDD and i dont like those little cameras.

Canon Vixia HV30 / 40 ftw

Scrabby: Nice, I was looking at the Panasonic SD10 but I don't use it enough to justify £300+.

xaid0n: Should be more than enough for vLogging, do you need HD for that though?

Jack: Sure, I'm thinking of mounting it to the car inside next time I go driving. The Youtube clip is obviously much lower bitrate, there's hardly any pixellation in the actual clip. It gives a good idea of the CMOS's colour reproduction and performance in different lighting though.

hazaky: It's memory card based, I didn't think the storage method affected quality tbh. The "little cameras" have matured a lot recently as HD sensors and the image processors to handle them are cheap and good quality can be had for very little money now.

Well, mine is 8GB flash memory so not a HDD
Looking forward to see actual footage quality of yours

I'm gonna use mine most for onboard video's when driving the S13

I'm not much of a technical guru in the camera department, but isn't 1080p quite, well... shit, for a resolution? It just sounds like the most recent hype - 1080p televisions, 1080p cameras. It's just 1920x1080 - that's basically just ~2 megapixel isn't it?

At least that's how it feels for console gaming: "I got 1080p on my xbawks!" - yes, whoopdeedoo. I had "1080p" on my PC in 1999. Welcome to last decade.

Anyway, I know squat about camera specs, so I should probably not get involved.

Excusé moi?

Quote :

I'm not much of a technical guru in the camera department, but isn't 1080p quite, well... shit, for a resolution?

For photos, yes. For TV and console gaming, no. These have been stuck at 720x576 for years, so 1920x1080 at 30fps is quite an achievement and a huge improvement in detail. Remember digital cinema is only circa 4MP (AFAIK) at the moment, and that's on a screen a couple of storeys high but it still looks good.

EDIT: I'm willing to bet most people still don't play PC games at anything more than 1280x800 on average unless they have a serious setup. You may be one of the lucky few there!

1920x1200 ftw. Although this is a bloody decent pc.

Yay I can buy one of these and mount it on my bike.

I play most games at 1920x1080 on my lappy

Suction mount is ordered for my onboard stories

This would probably be a good choice for onboard stuff, it doesn't cost much more than a basic bullet cam and is easily sucker-mountable in cars.

Ooh just a note on the resolution, it does the common HD camcorder trick of filming in anamorphic 1440x1080 then outputs 1920x1080 files. But hey, if it's good enough for GT5, it's good enough for me.

its dirt cheap... can you get extra battery packs tho ? also hard case... and is it SD stored ?

Batteries can be bought online I think, they're a "NP60 3.7V 1050mAh" which is common in phones and things AFAIK. It takes SD cards upto 16GB (apparently it hates Kingston cards though).

Hard case? As in carry case? It comes with a pouch, no idea if you can get other cases.