OTHER TECH

About halfway through the first viewing, something usually appears that my wife considers embarrassing. She'll complain that I never make tapes we can copy and send to her parents. When I shoot, I do a lot of in-camera "editing," but mistakes and embarrassing moments still creep in.

The Hitachi DZ-MV550A, however, made it easy to produce lightly edited home videos anyone could enjoy. During our first viewing of one of the Catskill Mountains videos - shot in Fine mode on DVD-RAM - I jotted notes about some shots we could eliminate. At the end, we recorded Lenny doing his usual wrap-up and an introduction teasing the upcoming action.

Afterward, I pressed the Menu button on the camcorder's remote control and got to work. I created a playlist and put Lenny's intro (the last shot) at the beginning, then selected and "moved" a total of 76 distinct scenes into the order I wanted them to follow. The whole process was easy and took only about 15 minutes.

Later that night, I simply played the edited sequence and made a DVD-R copy using the cam's analog S-video and stereo outputs. Voilà! A home video that could be sent to anyone - even Grandma! What could be quicker or simpler? The main limitations of DVD-RAM editing are that you can't draw material from different discs, or even different sides of the same disc, so with the Hitachi 's Fine mode, I had only 30 minutes of "footage" to work with.

For more ambitious editing, Hitachi provides two Windows software applications on a CD-ROM: DVD-MovieAlbumSE lets you capture the video from a disc in the camcorder through its USB port, save it to your PC's hard drive as a straight MPEG-2 file, and edit it however you like. Then you use MyDVD to convert the edited file back into DVD-R format, style titles and menus, and burn it to a blank disc in the camcorder or the PC's DVD drive.

PERFORMANCE If not done right, digital video encoding can produce visible distortions, or artifacts, like "blocking," where parts of the image break up into a mosaic of little color squares, and "mosquito noise," like a cloud of tiny bugs along sharp edges. I'm a big fan of MiniDV, which runs at a hefty 25 megabits per second (Mbps), and at first was skeptical of DVD camcorders, which use lower bit rates. But my experience with the Hitachi cam won me over. Its best-quality recording mode, Xtra, has a variable bit rate of 3 to 10 Mbps, but the picture and sound quality matched what I get from MiniDV. MPEG-2 is simply a more efficient data-compression scheme than DV.

PLUSExcellent picture quality on DVD-RAM in top mode. Flexible editing for DVD-RAM. Very good disc navigation. MINUSBlank discs cost more than MiniDV tape and provide less recording time. Cumbersome pushbutton manual focus. No FireWire port.

To test for encoding artifacts, I recorded my son Gerry doing some quick Ninja Turtle moves and also some water splashing - both very tough challenges for a real-time encoder. In the Xtra mode (18 minutes) I saw virtually no artifacts. Blocking was sometimes visible in Fine mode (30 minutes a side) and became bothersome in STD mode (60 minutes), which also noticeably lacked crispness. Comparing recordings of the same subjects in the Fine and Xtra modes, I was surprised to see subtle differences in texture, too, which convinced me that Xtra was worth the sacrifice in disc capacity. So if you're a stickler for picture quality, shoot in Xtra mode. The 30-minute LPCM mode, for DVD-R only, prioritizes audio over picture quality and is intended to provide compatibility with some older DVD players.

Like most camcorders these days, the DZ-MV550A can capture still images on flash-memory cards. But since its still-picture resolution is just 640 x 480 pixels, if you're interested in stills you should consider spending the extra $200 for Hitachi 's DZ-MV580A (1,280 x 960 pixels).

BOTTOM LINE The Hitachi DZ-MV550A is a cutting-edge camcorder that foreshadows the future. Inevitably, discs will replace tape. But for now, MiniDV is still the cheaper, if less cool, option. At a Wal-Mart, I saw blank double-sided DVD-RAM discs (36 minutes of Xtra-quality recording) for about $18. A blank single-sided DVD-R (30 minutes of Fine-quality recording) sold for about $8, or a couple of bucks more than a 60-minute MiniDV tape.

Hitachi loses a point or two for the cam's delayed record start and lack of a focus ring. But it's easy to use and offers excellent picture quality. Its small size and cute looks don't hurt, either. The DZ-MV550A will be most appreciated by people who'll really use its special features, like being able to edit home videos without a computer, play back any segment instantly, or record over and over on the same DVD-RAM disc.

After a few days, I also appreciated one more advantage of disc over tape: When you power up a DVD cam, you never have to worry about where you left off last time. It's always ready to record the next big thing.