- 10
- Oct
Tag : memory camcorder, mx20 flash, samsung sc, w 34x, optical zoom, black
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 Company : Samsung List Price : $249.99 Amazon Price : $249.99 Used Price : Average customer review :  |
Features
- Record high quality video images with 680K pixel CCD, plus Schneider Lens
- Get close to the action with 34x optical zoom / 1,200x digital zoom
- Also shoot H.264 (720×480i) - 6 hours recording with 8 GB card, or 16 hours with a 32 GB card
- Designed and optimized for easy YouTube uploading
- Features an advanced image stabilizer and a 2.7-inch LCD viewfinder
Product Description
The MX20 makes it easy to capture everything you want to remember and some you might want to forget. It features an optimized recording mode for YouTube, a schneider lens with 34x optical zoom, image stabilization and face detection. You can also record up to 16 hours using a 32 GB memory card. The SAMSUNG SC-MX20 also features the longest battery life in its class, lasting up to three hours. The SC-MX20 has a USB port for easy uploading of MPEG4 movie clips and JPEG still images to your PC. Silver
Customer reviews
Avoid this camera! 
I bought this video camera for my daughters big 15th birthday party. I tested it a few times for the party recording some short clips and all looked well. The video was a decent quality, the sound was good. It looked nice on my 32″ HDTV. Unfortunately all was NOT well. Any clip over approx. 5 minutes would drop frames, but continue to record sound… This is a big problem because the most important part of my daughters party was a 35 minute clip and in that clip there are dropped frames about every 3 minutes. So about 10 minutes into this clip the video and the sound are so far out of sync that it is painful to watch. By the end of the video the video is about 5 seconds ahead of the sound. This is totally unacceptable and I have lost a very important memory to a lousy designed camera. It is certainly conceivable that I got a lemon camera, but I tried it with multiple memory cards so it was definitely the camera’s fault and not my media. Just ask yourself before you purchase if you are willing to take that chance.
Perfect for what I need. 
I just wanted a little camcorder with decent quality. For the money you can’t go wrong with the SC-MX20. It is so simple and straight forward. The only thing I don’t like is that none of the common/standard media players can play mp4 format. Other than that I like it and am very happy with the quality of the video. I would recomend it. I did a lot of research on camcorders the ones with good reviews are $350 +. I decided to take a chance on this camcorder because it is so new there aren’t many reviews yet and I am very happy with my choice.
Almost perfect (for the price) 
I won’t dwell upon the little things missing from such an inexpensive camcorder (viewfinder, for one). You expect to sacrifice some details when you strip a camcorder down to its bare essentials and sell it cheap (well, not really cheap but inexpensive).
While you won’t get DV quality video, you will get acceptable quality as long as you understand that you’re shooting in a highly compressed H264. Editing your footage on your Mac is virtually impossible unless you convert it all to DV and edit it in iMovieHD (or use that iMovie’08 abomination). Personally, I use MPEG Streamclip to convert to DV, drop those conversions into iMovieHD, do my editing, and convert the “reference movie” using MPEG Streamclip so I get a nice H264 for my iPod or AppleTV.
I would have given this camcorder 4 stars but there is a flaw in the firmware that neglects to give any of the better quality settings (the 16:9 footage that’s better than the “YouTube” quality) the “16:9 flag” setting. So what you get is footage that’s squished narrow because all the players and editing apps see this video as 4:3. (QT Player and VLC on both Macs and PCs see this problem.) As I mentioned above, I use MPEG Streamclip (it’s free) to correct this problem when I export to DV - I set the 16:9 flag there. This problem with the camcorder is, frankly, inexcusable and shows that at least one engineer was asleep at the switch.
If this problem were fixed (a firmware update, perhaps?), I’d go back to a 4-star rating. How could it get 5 stars? Give me an external microphone port.
