HITACHI VM-D965LA.(Evaluation)

Hitachi Invades Sony Digital8 Territory

Until recently, Sony made the only Digital8 camcorders. But now, camcorder veteran-manufacturer Hitachi has entered that market with its new VM-D965LA. Like all the Digital8 camcorders, the Hitachi VM-D965LA offers many great benefits, with a few surprises.

First off is the recorded picture quality, which is essentially equivalent to the DV format--but at a fraction of the cost. Digital8 tape cost is less than half of an equivalent length of DV tape.

Hitachi's technical improvements to Digital8 are due to a special digital signal processor (DSP) chip. According to Hitachi engineers, this DSP chip improves recorded resolution up to 30 percent. It also improves playback quality in Hi8/8mm mode with a 50-percent reduction in playback color noise, a 50-percent increase in sharpness, and less playback jitter and picture skew in search mode.

If you're like me and have an archive of Hi8 tapes, you should be very excited by these improvements. They will let you make excellent Digital8 archival copies of your Hi8 masters and will also let you capture the highest quality video to your hard drive, using the camcorder's transcoding capabilities (more on that later).

Features

The VM-D965LA is full of all sorts of features: a 470,000-pixel (330,000 effective) CCD imaging sensor, a 22X Optical/500X Digital Zoom lens, a half-inch color viewfinder and 2.5-inch LCD panel, a wide variety of digital fades (Wipe, Mosaic, Art, White, and B&W), A/V input/output (S-video/ composite/stereo audio), Auto White Balance with Lock, Record Review (Hitachi calls it Quick Edit), Manual Focus control, Digital Effects (16x9, Negative/Positive, Mirror, Art, and Mosaic), Programmed AE modes (Sports, Portrait, Spotlight, and Gain-Up), A/V Insert Dub, and 16-or 12-bit Stereo PCM Audio.