Camcorder shopping

My JVC digital camcorder I bought just a few short years ago is now broken. It took excellent videos, but was constantly chewing up tapes (not a good thing). I have an old Sony camcorder that still works but the technology changed and it's hard to get the tapes for it. So now I'm window shopping for a new camcorder. I have my eye on the Pentax Optio MX4.

My sister had purchased the Pentax Optio MX4 (shown above) through QVC a while back. On Christmas day, she brought her camcorder with her and I put the videos on my Mac to see the quality of the movie. What I liked the most about the cam was the simplicity of uploading the movie to my Mac (or any PC). I didn't have to convert the video to make it into a movie, it was already a movie in MPEG 4 format. Now that is cool! The other plus to Pentax is you don't use a tape. It uses SD cards as its storage medium. Video can be taken at a resolution up to 640 x 480 at 30 frames per second, and it can also take still images at a decent resolution of 4 Megapixels. That part isn't important to me because I already have an 8 MP digital camera that takes excellent pictures.

Click on above image to view movie of my sister's dog, Bonsai. All I did was take the video off the SD card from her camera to my Mac. Without editing, I just uploaded it to my web site. Since the screen size is big, it will take around a minute or two before movie will appear. Also, you will need QuickTime to view the movie. It won't work on Dial Up...the file is way too big. Normally I would make the file smaller for faster downloading, however, I wanted to give you an example of the quality of the movie on the Internet at it's highest resolution. Besides, It was a good excuse to show you how cute my sister's dog is.

Some of the other inexpensive camcorders that have SD cards do not take clear movies like Pentax Optio MX4. This camcorder is under $300 and I'm impressed with the quality of the videos. I think this camera is fantastic for the price. I want this camcorder but can't get one because it's out of stock everywhere!