OTHER TECH

A couple of days with the family at our summer cabin in New York 's Catskill Mountains helped me put the cam through its paces. The many subtly varied shades of green in the foliage combined with a couple of fast-moving kids challenged its MPEG-2 encoding prowess. And thanks to rain, which led to lots of indoor shooting, I also put its low-light performance to the test. You can select low-light exposure via a menu, but it gave a stroboscopic, low-frame-rate look to my indoor shots. Given moderate illumination, auto-exposure (with full frame rate) usually provided very good indoor recordings.

Fast Facts DIMENSIONS (WxHxD) 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 x 5 3/4 inches WEIGHT 1 1/4 pounds with battery PRICE $800 MANUFACTURER Hitachi Home Electronics, hitachi.com/tv, 800-448-2244 Key Features • Records video on single- or double-sided 3-inch DVD-RAM and DVD-R discs • Records stills on disc or SD/MMC card • 680,000-pixel, 1/4 -inch image sensor • 2 1/2 -inch (diagonal) LCD viewscreen • 18 x optical zoom range (up to 500 x digital) • electronic image stabilizer • manual overrides for exposure, focus (pushbuttons), white balance • inputs/outputs composite/S-video inputs and outputs, all with stereo audio; USB 2.0 port (Windows drivers only); microphone input; SD/MMC slot

My biggest operational complaint is that the red record indicator appears in the viewfinder (and the tally light goes on) about a second before actual recording begins -something you need to keep in mind when you're doing quick-draw shooting. My kids enjoyed seeing themselves on the rotatable LCD viewscreen while I looked through the viewfinder. Too bad the pull-out viewfinder doesn't tilt up - to use it, you have to hold the cam directly in front of your face.

I missed having a fader button and manual focus ring, though you can add fades to DVD-RAM recordings after shooting and focus manually using pushbuttons. There's also no headphone jack, and the cam lacks the FireWire (a.k.a. i.Link or IEEE 1394) in/out port you find on all MiniDV camcorders, which means you can't make a digital dub from the DZ-MV550A to another camcorder, or vice versa. There is a USB 2.0 port to transfer recordings to or from a Windows PC but no Mac support.

PLAYBACK AND EDITING Imagine showing friends a video filled with segments shot at tourist spots during a trip through Europe . They'll say, "Let's see the Eiffel Tower !" or "Show us Buckingham Palace !" With a videocassette, you'd have to figure out where on the tape those segments were. With a DVD recorded on the MV550A, you can instantly jump to a requested segment - Hitachi calls it a "scene" - by selecting the thumbnail image of its first frame. And with a DVD-RAM, you can select and rearrange for playback scenes on the same side of the disc (the recording is not affected) using the Playlist menu. Scenes can also be divided, useful for trimming unwanted footage, and you can add fade-ins, fade-outs, or wipes.

I'm an experienced video (and film) editor, yet, like most of us, I've got a pile of unedited family videotapes. Conventional editing is very time consuming. Just "capturing" the raw footage on a computer takes time, and then after you edit it, the computer has to "render" the finished production, and then you have to copy it back to tape or DVD-R. Editing may be the best aspect of DVD recording because it lets you make your home videos much more enjoyable without a lot of time or effort.

To put this in context, let me explain the routine my family has come up with for shooting and viewing home videos on MiniDV. As we near the end of shooting a segment, we'll shoot a wrap-up, typically featuring our Lenny the Lion hand puppet as "host," saying goodbye. When we're done, we watch the tape straight through while making a copy to VHS - or DVD-R on my DVD recorder. That becomes the version my kids watch again and again, while the MiniDV "master" goes into my library.