Sony DCR-HC38 Camcorder Reviewby Michael PerlmanPublished on Jun 25, 2007 8:11 AM
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Compression (5.5)
What kind of compression? Hold on a minute, sonny. Let me get my spectacles. In all serious, it’s actually refreshing to see a DV camcorder, which is obviously a dying breed. It seems that consumers just don’t have patience for tape anymore, despite a lot of advantages. Yes, DVDs and HDDs are faster and offer random access, but we have yet to see MPEG-2 footage that looks as good as DV footage from a camcorder with the same imaging system. The issue is data speed, primarily. DV records at a fixed 25Mbps, while standard definition MPEG-2 moves at a max of 8.5 - 9 Mbps. On the screen, that’s going to mean more compression artifacts – those little, square blocks that dance around the edges of things. If you can deal with the extra time it takes to rewind, fast forward, and capture the tape to a computer for editing, you’ll be rewarded with better quality than your Johnny Quickpants neighbor.
Media (6.0)
The Sony DCR-HC38 (Specs, $279) records video to MiniDV tapes, which are cheap and widely available. Tape has fallen out of favor as a viable media because people prefer the speed of random access media like DVDs and hard disk drives (HDD). There are several reasons to choose tape, though. Archiving is simple and safe. Tapes can sit on a dry shelf for years with little corrosion. Unlike DVDs, if a little bit of the tape gets messed up, the rest of footage will remain unaffected. The finicky directory system of a DVD means that one bit of corruption can kill the disc. And unlike HDDs, a collection of tapes is spread out in neat, sixty minute packages. One bad tape is not the end of your collected memories. A corrupted HDD, if you forget to back-up (or don’t have a chance) might wipe out an entire vacation. Tape is durable, cheap, and relatively reliable.
Editing (8.0)
DV has been around for years, so you can capture and work with the DCR-HC38’s video in pretty much any editing software. For the same reason, there are dozens of free editing programs that you use to stitch DV footage together. The same can not be said for cutting edge formats like AVCHD, which can barely be played back on your DVD player, let alone edited. One such free program is Avid FreeDV, for which we ran a lengthy tutorial series.