Link: http://gdgt.com/samsung/sc-mx20/review/1v9/
Samsung SC-MX20 reviews
By pika2000 - Sep 24, 2009
Pros: -Uses H.264. Most standard def camcorders from other manufactures use some kind of proprietary bull crap MPEG2 compression, which is not compatible with many video editing software. The SCMX20 uses H.264, compatible with iMovie for easy editing. -Standard def resolution is perfectly acceptable, especially if the end result is just youtube/facebook -Interval recording. Probably the killer feature of this model, especially at its price point. This feature allow the camcorder to record a frame every specified interval. This creates a super high-speed effect when you playback the resulting video. Here's an example: http://tinyurl.com/y8bu428 You can create tons of creative videos with this feature. -Widescreen recording, with a catch (see cons) -Acceptable video quality (see cons) -Decent stereo sound recording, for the price -34x optical zoom -Built-in lens cap -Cheap -Uses SD/SDHC -Has tripod hole
Cons: -Not HD. -Other than the lowest quality "youtube" setting, the video recorded is interlaced. This mean you have to de-interlaced the video before uploading/editing. If not, your vidoes will have those annoying "jaggies." Extremely annoying. -The "widescreen" video doesn't have a correct aspect ratio/scaling, meaning your videos will look squished. Not bad for nature or scenery, but unusable for scenes with people. Required pre/postprocessing to fix every video. Again, extremely annoying and time consuming. -Battery life doesn't seem to last as long, and it drained out fairly quickly when the device is off. -Lens cap is manual, not automatic -Like with many cheap camcorders, low-light performance is not great. Also, sometimes the camera is confused on which subject to focus on. -No mic/line-in The alternative: At a similar price point, there are more and more regular digital cameras that can record videos now, some even in HD. They usually have better optics and/or sensor, thus usually give better quality (and most record progressive video, no need for deinterlacing). Obviously the downside is that you don't have 34x optical zoom, and most digicams only record video with mono sound (and most of them are poor at best). Most digicams won't allow optical zooming during recording either. I bought this camcorder the minute it was out. I was tired of seeing standard def camcorders using the lousy inefficient non-editing-friendly MPEG2 compression. This is my first camcorder, and the interval recording is definitely the killer feature. Without it, this camcorder is not so great/fun. The need to deinterlace and rescale the videos to the aspect ratio really took quite a bit of the fun out (and a lot of time too). On a Mac, I recommend MPEG Streamclip to de-interlace and scale the videos correctly. For the price, it's really not a bad camcorder. I just wish Samsung put progressive recording instead of interlaced.