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DVD cams still pricey but features are plentiful

By Deborah Porterfield
Gannett News Service

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Now that DVD players have gone mainstream, you'd think DVD camcorders would become best sellers, too.

But unlike DVD players, which have dropped dramatically in price, DVD camcorders are still relatively expensive.

The new Sony DCR-DVD201 DVD Handycam (www.sonystyle.com), for example, costs $1,000, considerably more than most tape-based camcorders.

Even so, folks who are willing to splurge will find plenty to like in this high-end digital model with a top-notch Carl Zeiss lens, a 2.5-inch swivel liquid-crystal display (LCD), a 10x optical zoom and a 120x digital zoom. In addition to recording video onto 3-inch DVD-Recordable (DVD-R) and DVD-Rewritable (DVD-RW) discs, this camcorder can capture still shots with a resolution of 1,152-by-864 pixels. Other helpful features include a motion sensor that minimizes the impact of a shaky camera and a night-shot option.

Even though the camcorder is loaded with multiple features, its clearly labeled controls are easy to find and operate. The camcorder has two conveniently located record buttons. One is on the back of the camera just under the power control. The other is on a side panel by the LCD screen.

The camera also has a handy battery button that lets you check the remaining shooting time without powering up the camcorder.

During testing, the DVD camcorder easily captured a variety of scenes. It shot vivid scenes of a school play in a dark auditorium and captured action shots of skateboarders on a sunny day. It weighs just a little more than a pound and is small enough to slip in a jacket pocket.

One of the DVD camcorder's biggest strengths is the way it automatically saves individual recordings as visual cue cards. Discs display the available scenes on its LCD screen. This visual index can be especially useful when you're recording on DVD-RW discs, because it can help you quickly delete or edit sections before finalizing them for playback.

When you're ready to finalize the disc so it can be played back in a DVD player, all you have to do is press the "finalize" button.

You also can transfer the recordings to a computer via a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection, edit the footage and, if you want, transfer the new version back to your camcorder. You can even connect the camcorder to a VCR and transfer home movies from the tape onto the disc in the camcorder, or vice versa.
 
One downside of recording on the 3-inch DVDs is that the individual discs don't have as much storage room as standard DVDs or MiniDV tapes.

A single 3-inch DVD can only hold about 30 minutes of standard-quality recording. If you opt for the highest-quality setting, the recording time drops to 20 minutes. The long-play setting, which reduces the image quality, buys you 60 minutes.

USB Server

Keyspan

$99

You have one printer, one scanner, a digital-camera card reader — and three PCs.

How do you avoid purchasing multiple peripherals for each machine? With a device like Keyspan's new network-enabled USB Server.

The $99 gadget hooks into your home or small-office LAN and acts, literally, like a server. But, instead of serving files, it serves up devices. Up to four USB 1.1 peripherals — scanners, printers, Webcams, card readers, Zip drives, etc. — can be connected to the four ports on the USB Server to be shared among all your PCs and Macs (assuming your devices already work with your PCs and/or Macs).

Setup is simple. Plug in the USB Server's power cable and connect it to your wired or wireless network hub or router. Then connect your USB devices. The third step involves installation of the server's support software to your computers. The software essentially creates a USB hub out on the network.

Once the software is installed, you run the Keyspan configuration software to complete the server setup and to reinstall and set up the drivers for each device. Then you're done.

You run the same setup on each PC or Mac that will be used with the USB Server.

Installation had only one glitch. It was necessary to open a port in the Windows firewall configuration on a PC that had been upgraded to the Windows XP Service Pack 2 to allow two-way communication between the server and the PC.

After that, everything worked fine. An HP Photosmart printer, a 3Com Webcam, a Sony portable CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, and a Lexmark printer/scanner combo all became network accessible.

The device-sharing in question isn't true always-available-to-everyone sharing. The Keyspan USB Server acts more like a physical switch. If John is using the printer, Jane has to wait until he's done, and until he's instructed the Keyspan software on his PC to disconnect. Then she can connect using the software on her PC.

The device is, for now, only capable of running at USB 1.1 speeds. That's good enough for most home and small-office peripherals, but not for devices that need high-bandwidth connections.

— Tom Gromak, The Detroit News