The Consumer’s Corner

‘You get what you pay for.’ Those are generally very wise words. But sometimes, especially with electronics, you may not be expecting much, and something cheap may be just enough to get the job done. That was the mental mind set I was under the influence of when I purchased the SVP HDDV 2300 digital camcorder.

As a general rule, when buying electronic equipment, I don’t go ‘bargain hunting.’ Name brands are name brands for a reason; if I’m going to be dropping some major coin on something, I want to know it’s going to be a dependable product. The problem I faced was a simple one, I had a budget of >$100 to work with, and none of the big guys offer a decent camera in that price range. While eBay’ing, I came across a bunch of these low cost cameras, and despite some bad reviews, I decided to take a chance.

Here’s what came in my box, which arrived at my door for $74.99. The camera itself, a 2 gig generic SD card, a mini tripod, 2 AA batteries, a video cable, USB cable, velvet(ish) carrying bag, and a driver disc. My initial thought was ‘Cool!’ The camera looked nice astatically, and I was pleased with the included accessories.

Now for the camera itself. The bad reviews that I’d read were not inaccurate, in the sense that this is not the greatest camera you can buy. Where they were wrong is this can be a decent purchase for you, depending on what you plan on using it for. I wanted something small, highly portable, designed to work with SD cards, and would take a decent (read: YouTube quality) capture while sitting on a tripod. The SVP 2300 delivered on all of those requirements. The microphone surprised me as well, it did a pretty good job recording sound.

If you want something to film precious memories with, I’d certainly look elsewhere. If you have an unsteady hand, or plan on moving around a lot while shooting, you will be sadly disappointed with an SVP. The picture bends, badly, when the camera is moved. You also need to have decent lighting; the censor leaves a lot to be desired in low light environments.

Over all, I think SVP offers better quality than ‘toy’ video cameras, but definitely not as much as those low end name brand cameras that are $50 more expensive. I do not regret my purchase, in fact I think it will pay for itself pretty quickly doing the work I intend for it to do, but I’ll definitely be upgrading as soon as my finances allow me to. Mildly recommended for videobloggers, and tween’s first camera.

Official Site

–Jeremy Hobbs

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 20th, 2008 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Electronics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.