Bulky translator

My family owned one 8mm and one hi8 camcorders, but both were starting to fail after many years of use and abuse. It was time to get a new camcorder. But which one should I get?

In terms of size, MiniDV camcorders are small to tiny. They are also extremely lightweight. Such attributes are nice for my wife, who has a pair of relatively small hands. However, since the family already has a sizeable 8mm and hi8 video library, backward compatibility is also important.

Since I bought the Canon S110 digital camera, my wife found herself organizing pictures a lot more efficiently online. It'd be nice if we could just as easily organize our video tape collection. This means we need a means to digitize our existing library in order to use our computers to edit, sort and organize our video library.

This leaves us only with the Sony Digital8 (hence D8) camcorders. I choose the TRV740 because it has a one megapixel CCD, which is sufficient for shooting pictures for web publishing purposes.

Out of the box

Setting up was easy. Plug in the battery, then plug in the DC power supply cable. The charger circuitry is built-in to the camcorder. This is nice if you don't want to carry a battery charger around. This is not so nice if you want to use one battery and charge another one. I ended up buying a separate battery and a separate charger so I can charge one while using another one. The Sony included DC power supply does not have a cigarette lighter adaptor for in-car charging, this is another reason to get another charger that has a car kit.

One very nice feature, although it may be standard on all camcorders, is that it shows how many minutes of battery life is remaining. This number is dynamically updated. In other words, if you use the LCD panel, it decreases, if you use the smaller view-finder, it increases. This is possible because the battery and the camcorder communicates so the remaining run time is calculated based on battery capacity and actual average current draw.

Tape insertion is a little different from our older Sony camcorders. The TRV740 opens at the bottom to expose the tape insertion mechanism. This used to be on the top. At any rate, it was easy to insert and remove a tape. Just make sure you read the labels and only press on the parts that is labeled for pushing. The manual has nice diagrams to show you what to do. You only need to learn this once.

VCR/camera control and zoom control on this camcorder also differs from older Sony camcorders. It's okay, but I prefer the older zoom button placement. It's not a big deal, though.

Connectivity

Connecting the a regular TV is easy. The included A/V cables allow you to easily connect the camcorder to an NTSC input or S-video input. Nothing to write home about.

Connecting to a PC, on the other hand, requires a bit of commenting. The included Pixela software allows you to capture via the USB port or the Firewire (Sony i-link) port. Unfortunately, the Sony manual mentions very little about the Firewire interface.

The built-in USB streaming feature is nearly useless. This is because the picture quality is so bad that it is barely useful. I do not recommend it for anything. In the USB streaming mode, the PC has very little control over the camcorder, making this interface totally useless.

The Firewire interface, with its 400Mbps bandwidth, is capable of original (as recorded on tape) video streaming from the camcorder. In addition, the PC has control over most of the features of the camcorder. You do need to spend about $10 for a 6-pin to 4-pin Firewire cable since Sony does not include one.

As for the included Pixela video capturing software, don't even bother to install. While it is okay for viewing recorded tapes on a computer, it is useless for capturing any video. It has a feature to capture video, but it apparently requires a lot of hard disk bandwidth. In other words, you need to have a very fast hard disk and a very fast IDE controller to do this. If you want to capture video on a computer or perform online video editing, I recommend the use of ULead's VideoStudio6.

With VideoStudio6, you can preview, capture, edit, organize, add special effects and produce the final product on DVD, VCD, SVCD or back to the D8 tape (which is possible with the TRV740 since it is also a VCR). Yeah, you have to spend about $100 on this extra piece of software, but it has useful features that makes your camcorder very useful.

I was able to set up an AMD Athlon XP 2000 WinXP system so it captures video to an AMD K6-2@300MHz Linux file server via a 100Mbps network (routed). I tested the available bandwidth (for writing to the Linux server) and it is in the order of 10kBps, which is more than 2x of what the software requires. If you don't have a Linux file server, you may need to consider a second hard drive that is dedicated to captured video.

Picture Quality

You cannot distinguish the picture quality of D8 from Hi8 on a regular TV. However, if you replay the tape via a computer, it makes a big difference. D8 is a bit sharper and with better color saturation.

Conclusion

I am very pleased with the TRV740 so far. It has too many nifty features that I will probably never use (such as built-in IR illuminated zero-lux recording). It is a nice camcorder, and it also allows my wife and I digitize all of our existing video tapes.

If you do not need to convert a library of older 8mm or hi8 tapes, this camcorder may be a little too bulky.