Samsung Hi8

[OGIII]

Being disillusioned with DV I’ve decided to get a small Hi8 camcorder. I was happy with the Samsung 8mm I had so I’m looking at something like the VP-L770, 750, 700.

Does anybody have one of these? Any good?

Cheers
OG

Hi, I own Samsung SCL-700 (ntsc model), which does not have snapshot nor image stabilation, which 770 has. The image quality is fairly good outdoors, doesn't seem to be grainy. Indoors the picture quality is worse, with poor lighting it tends to get grainy. But otherwise low light shooting is fine (if you don't mind the graininess), 0.3lux needed to shoot, so it captures even the tinyest hint of light, allthough it tends to seek the focus point. When shooding a bright spot then moving to darker spot, camera does compensate quicky for the changing lighting, heard few cameras have problems doing that. Problems I have had with my cam, have been with the tapes. Cam has "eaten" 4 tapes and giving some wierd error that was corrected by ejecting the tape and putting it back in, but that seems to be gone, after using the cam for 3 months. Overall perfomance is ok, but I guess far from DV-quality. Actually, I'm looking for mini-DV cam atm
Cheers, Punikki

[OGIII]

Thanks for reply Punikki.

How do you find the battery life, and more particularly, if you leave the battery on the camera but don't use it for a few days does it retain it's charge or are you always having to take the battery of to charge it up?

Cheers
OG

Hi OGIII,
I got 2 hour battery when I purchased the cam (one hour battery with the cam), and it lasts about
an hour when using LCD, haven't used view finder only, but propably will last close to 2 hours using only vf.
The battery retains it's charge when not using the camera and leaving the battery on (never taken it off actually). The battery can only be charged when the battery is on the camera (atleast with the charger that comes with the camera).
Hope this helped. All in all, the camera performs as expected, and really like the 22x optical zoom, which equals to 48-1056mm in 35mm film format
Punikki

[OGIII]

Thanks for info Punikki - really helpful, looking more and more likely that I'll get on of these.

Cheers
OG