Canon DC50 First Impressions Camcorder Reviewby David KenderPublished on Jan 22, 2007 6:00 AM
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Compression
The Canon DC50 compresses video in the MPEG-2 format, common to all standard definition HDD and DVD camcorders. It’s a limiting format, certainly of a lower quality than tape-based DV, but we’re not likely to see an improvement. The world is going high definition, and AVCHD, an MPEG-4 format, is the future (at least for now).
There are three quality settings on the DC50 that correspond to maximum bit rates. The lower the bit rate, the more video you can fit on a disk. XP mode as an approximate data rate of 9Mbps, SP at 6Mbps, and LP at 3Mbps.
Media
The Canon DC50 records video to 8cm DVDs (also known as “miniDVD”) in the following formats: DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD-R DL (dual layer). In the highest quality, a single layer disc can only hold about 20 minutes of video (double that for dual layer discs), which is probably the biggest drawback to DVD camcorders. A long trip means a bag full of DVDs, and one bad scratch on a disc could wipe out 20 minutes or more of important memories. This is one reason people cling to tape, which is remarkably durable. Hard disk drive (HDD) camcorders also avoid this problem.
Editing
Last year’s Canon DVD camcorders proved trickier to edit than most DVD camcorders, due to their annoying predilection of splitting up each clip into several files, rather than a united .MPG file like Sony does. Practically speaking, this meant that only the included Canon software could work with the footage, limiting your editing options. We have yet to see if this is the case again, but even if the DC50 exports files in the same manner, there are likely new editing solutions available.
