Now let me go back to one other thing…it’s comfortable!  Being so small and light is of course a major plus but it’s only one part of it.  The fact that is has the angled lens lets your hand sit comfortably without the annoying strain on your wrist.  Those 3 factors – small, light and the comfortable position of the wrist – made filming during labor and the hours after tolerable.  No doubt I wouldn’t be able to do it with any other camera without a tripod.

I bought it to have an easy way of doing the video and then just playing straight onto my ps3.  The problem with that is that it looks like it’s having a problem deinterlacing the video so you get this jitter look on the video.  There are lines on the screen when the cam moves or if something moves on screen.  Kinda defeats the purpose.

I found a workaround though.  I converted the file using winff and that fixed the issue.  It seems that the container they encode the video to on the camcorder is at 60 frames per minute while the actual video is only 30.  If I use winff to reencode the video to 30 fps, the jitters go away.  Ffmpeg reports the error as “Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 59.94 -> 29.97″.  This really isn’t a big deal for me since I can convert the file to other formats and get rid of the error.  My only issue was that I really wanted to skip any unwanted conversions.  Having our old handycam and using software to “watch” and then encode the video took the time to view it plus time to encode it.  Granted we are nowhere near that time here and with my 16GB card I can save almost 400 minutes of video before having to dump anything.  Combine that with the fact that winff can do a batch convert, I can convert a full day’s worth of video while I sleep.

The videos are pretty hefty too.  An 8 minute video was about 600MB.  Don’t go cheap on the memory card.  Granted, the battery will run out before the space does but you’ll want the space for that week long vacation.

Converting videos generally take longer than the run time of the video…I averaged processing about 27 fps of the original 30 fps on my pentium dual-core @ 2.4GHz.

Overall I’m really happy with the camcorder.  I have no intention of going back to get another one.  For all of the ones within the same price range or more, they were heavier and generally only offered the ability to zoom in farther and take photos.  I haven’t found a reason to zoom in any closer than 10x yet and I already have a point and shoot.