jomike
Prominent Member
Have been reading some of the posts here and realise that there seems to be a lot of confusion and misinformation re DVD camcorders. These are my experiences with the Sony DVD 230E.
I bought the camcorder in July 2005. This is the first camcorder I have owned, and I decided to go the DVD route for ease of use. I looked at the Sony 403E as well, but this was out of my price range. I mainly needed the camcorder to record memories of a trip to South Africa. I also bought 3 -RW Emtec 8cm DVDs. The DVDs hold 20 mins of HQ video.
As I don't have a DVD drive yet, I transfer the movie clips from the camcorder to my PC using the USB port and the (rather clunky) Sony software that comes with the camcorder. As my PC has no USB2 ports, this is on the slow side. (20 min of video takes +- 20 min to download). If I had a DVD drive, I would finalise the DVD and then copy the clips from the DVD, much faster. I then reformat the -RW DVD and use it again. I use a native MPEG editor (Womble MPEG Video Wizard) to edit the downloaded clips. This is quick, and because the software does not re encode, no loss of quality occurs when saving the edited clip. No editing is possible in the camera itself in video mode. The quality is DVD quality and IMHO quite acceptable for playback on a TV or PC. I have also made some SVCDs (using TMPGEnc) which are also of passable quality. You can set the camcorder for 16:9 or 4:3.
To answer some of the criticisms of DVD camcorders:
Expensive media - I reuse the same 3 8cm -RW DVDs over and over. They are coming down in price as well.
Hard to edit clips - valid for in camera editing. Once the clips are transferred to a PC, same as any other video clips.
Low quality video - Matter of opinion. If you are producing documentaries for the BBC sure, but for home video, DVD quality is IMHO OK. The Sony 403E has had some good reviews in this area.
To sum up, I am very happy with the Sony DVD203E. For home use it is very easy to use and can give good results in combination with some decent editing software (not the bundled Sony software). I really like Womble MPEG video Wizard. It is easy to use and it's fast.
Any other Sony or other make DVD camcorder owners to share their experiences, good or bad?
I bought the camcorder in July 2005. This is the first camcorder I have owned, and I decided to go the DVD route for ease of use. I looked at the Sony 403E as well, but this was out of my price range. I mainly needed the camcorder to record memories of a trip to South Africa. I also bought 3 -RW Emtec 8cm DVDs. The DVDs hold 20 mins of HQ video.
As I don't have a DVD drive yet, I transfer the movie clips from the camcorder to my PC using the USB port and the (rather clunky) Sony software that comes with the camcorder. As my PC has no USB2 ports, this is on the slow side. (20 min of video takes +- 20 min to download). If I had a DVD drive, I would finalise the DVD and then copy the clips from the DVD, much faster. I then reformat the -RW DVD and use it again. I use a native MPEG editor (Womble MPEG Video Wizard) to edit the downloaded clips. This is quick, and because the software does not re encode, no loss of quality occurs when saving the edited clip. No editing is possible in the camera itself in video mode. The quality is DVD quality and IMHO quite acceptable for playback on a TV or PC. I have also made some SVCDs (using TMPGEnc) which are also of passable quality. You can set the camcorder for 16:9 or 4:3.
To answer some of the criticisms of DVD camcorders:
Expensive media - I reuse the same 3 8cm -RW DVDs over and over. They are coming down in price as well.
Hard to edit clips - valid for in camera editing. Once the clips are transferred to a PC, same as any other video clips.
Low quality video - Matter of opinion. If you are producing documentaries for the BBC sure, but for home video, DVD quality is IMHO OK. The Sony 403E has had some good reviews in this area.
To sum up, I am very happy with the Sony DVD203E. For home use it is very easy to use and can give good results in combination with some decent editing software (not the bundled Sony software). I really like Womble MPEG video Wizard. It is easy to use and it's fast.
Any other Sony or other make DVD camcorder owners to share their experiences, good or bad?