A Camcorder for Homebuilders

Samsung SC-MX10-XAA. Type that into Google, they'll show you a
picture of it. But it is smaller than it looks -- it's about the size
of a small Russet potato... about 5" long by 2.5" in diameter.

Street price is about $180 (as of May 2008)

If you're an accomplished videographer you'd never give this camera a
second glance. It lacks the bells & whistles. In fact, it's about as
complicated as a box-camera; it doesn't even have a view-finder. It
has no moving parts. Instead of tapes or disks, it records on those
plug-in memory chips, the ones about the size of a postage stamp. And
at barely six ounces, it's too light; not enough mass. Hold it in
your hand, the resulting video shows every breath you take.

But at six ounces, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see you can
pull some g's with the thing, as in attaching it to your airplane.
(It has the usual 1/4-20 tripod mount, plus the indexing hole for shoe-
type tripods.)

Press the red button, it starts taking pictures. If you're using the
Automatic focus and electronic damping, you'll get a pretty good
image, one that's a bit sharper than most because it uses 720x480
pixels. That fills up your memory chip pretty fast but you can buy
chips having up to 8 Gigabytes of capacity... and even 4G will give
you TWO HOURS of recording, which is about the life of your battery.

The battery is a plug-in brick and they'll sell you a spare.

The camera uses MPEG4 format, which is different from most other video
cameras. But after passing the images through your PC you can convert
them into anything you want, assuming your PC has the Right Stuff (ie,
fast CPU and lotsa RAM, plus lots of disk space).

But it's light. It's small. Poke it in your pocket or hang it around
your neck, you can wear it all day and never notice. And it takes
only a minute to plug-in a fresh battery and a new memory chip. The
used ones go into a zip-loc along with your notes -- names & addresses
of the people you've been bothering :-) (Leave the LCD screen closed,
hold the camera UNDER your arm, most folks never even notice you're
recording.)

The camera comes with all the cabling needed to recharge the battery,
connect to your computer or play the images through a TV set. Samsung
also includes a fairly comprehensive suite of video editing software.
It's not Adobe 'Premiere' but it is more than adequate at the Basic
Training Film level.

Today is the 4th of May 2008. I've a hunch the price of this unit
will drop significantly in the coming year. (I paid over $300 for the
thing a few months ago and the price has already fallen by about 40%.)

I've found this little video camera to be a very useful tool. I've a
hunch some of you will too.

-R.S.Hoover