Testing the Samsung SC-MX20 camcorder on a short early morning run. Very sorry for the orientation – the viewfinder is a flip-out panel and couldn’t use that while keeping it secure in this temporary mount (duct taped to the left mirror stem).
Even allowing for that, I don’t think the video quality is as good as my older Canon camera’s video quality.
And none of the reviews on the Samsung that I had read identified a really big issue – although the battery is potentially capable of shooting 3 hours of video (*if* you do it all in a row and apparently right after recharging – I got it to happen once in three days of testing) – it takes 1.5 hours (!) to recharge from the included wall charger, and I’m not a patient person.
As has been pointed out elsewhere on the web, this camcorder will *only* accept proprietary batteries – so even if a non-Samsung battery says it’ll work, it won’t – or so I’ve read (there’s apparently a chip in the camcorder to prevent off-brand batteries from working). The BestBuy guy did not have information about a car charger kit, or a charger that could be used for a battery outside the camcorder if you wanted to buy the $35 Samsung battery and have a spare handy for long videos… so I’m not sure these things exist… I haven’t found them on the web but I didn’t look extensively.
I guess for a $200 camcorder this really isn’t that bad – the quality is better than what I’m seeing from the Flips, that’s for sure. It’s not working for my purposes and that battery issue is a big one for me, so it’s going back (15% restocking fee or not, sheesh… next time I’ll just bring my memory chips and laptop to the store, and spend the day!).
Duration : 0:8:34
