Customer Rating: Summary: works great! Comment: My brother got one and he is happy with it. I borrowed his and it worked great for me while I went on a trip to Canada during summer. I really can't tell the different between this camera and a Nikon Coolpix I bought a couple years ago. Anyhow, I think anything less than $200 for a multi-funcational camera like this is well worth the money. Customer Rating: Summary: SVP HDDV8800 Comment: Bought this cam as an interrim after sending my Aiptek GO-HD for replacement. I am not overly enthousiastic about the design, quality and service.
This can uses a CCD as oppossed to a CMOS, so it is good in low light conditions and subsequently battles in bright light. Swings & roundabouts!. When bright conditions exist, a small iris swings in front of the CCD to reduce the amount of light. When conditions are in the middle, the iris clicks in and out and the sound is captured by the mic.
The mic placement is a sore point. It is situated at the bottom of the body just where your pinkie is, and is prone to blocking out all sound. This has been moved to the LCD on the 8900. As this is a digital zoom, there are no zooming sounds capture on the mic, so the sound trak is fairly good.
The advertising is mis-leading by using the term High Definition, which it is not. This cam max resolution is D1 or 720. Options are QVGA, VGA and D1. The quality is not that good compared to the GO-HD at the same resolution. The 3" flip out screen is fairly good. The cam has a 6X zoom and being digital it accentuates the poor quality at max zoom. Maybe my cam was just a bum model!I requested info from SVP USA to send the cam for a re-callibration, received a ?? back from them. Typical response for a throw-away product!
The battery is an internal 1300mAh lipo, which is good for about 45 mins of use and then it has to be re-charged, taking about 1 to 1.5 hour.
The cam uses SD cards and I had no problem using a 4GB. The placement of the "Main joystick" can be a problem with small hands, coupled to the mic problem and takes time getting used to. Quite often I accidently took a picture when zooming. The Menu "Joystick" is small also takes practise using.
The cam has some extras, MP3 player through the internal speaker and Tetris & Sokoban.
The operation manual is functional and it takes a while to understand the description of the function and a lot of guessing and trying how to get it going. The menu system on the cam itself is reasonably straight forward, there being separate menu's for the video and camera functions.
