The Gizmophile

Don’t even think about buying the Panasonic SDR-H80K camcorder…  It’s a joke…

The resolution is at 704×480 versus the 720×480 offered in standard MiniDV and/or DVD video formats.

While it has worthwhile features, like optical image stabilization, 70x optical zoom, and SDHC flash memory compatibility…  It doesn’t compensate for the lack of 16 vertical lines of resolution.  Sure, you can futz with video editing software, and try to smooth out the jaggies…  But is it really worth it?  Most video editing software have pre-made templates for beginners and novices…  Why confuse those people with non-standard video resolution?

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I recently purchased and then promptly returned this camcorder, due to the quality of the recorded footage.

Stay tuned while I organize thoughts and research this camcorder, and the apparent interpolation of the pixels it captures.

To give you some idea of the quality of the footage, which was recorded to the internal 60GB HDD, take a photo and add the effect of mosaic, and reduce it to around .1 or .5 pixels in diameter.  Now, imagine that photo, but with motion, would you call that high definition?  If you attach an HDMI cable to this camcorder and plug it into say a Samsung LN40A650, you’d see this soft noise coupled with yellow/orange spots on a white wall with ample ambient light.

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The hard drive finally came in the mail today.  What a quick turn around and for 20 bucks plus free shipping, I can’t complain.  Looks like I made a mistake though and only got the 10gb version instead of the 20gb model.  It’s OK since I don’t think I’ll use up that much space.  In fact, I don’t ever recall putting more than 10gb of mp3’s on this iPod.

As you can see from the picture, it looks about the same as the old one.  With the exception of the model number and the Apple logo, it looks like the old drive and based on what I found, this hard drive should work just fine with my iPod.  We’ll see about that.

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After six long years, my iPod finally died and I think it was a slow and painful death too.  It had been acting up recently and it was making clicking sounds over the last month or two.  I am impressed that this iPod lasted for this long and I’m sure it will last a few more years assuming I can revive it or waste 25 bucks trying.

So instead of buying a new or used  iPod, iPhone, etc, I thought it would be more fun to crack it open and experiment a little.  Judging by the error on the display and the clicking noises, I was pretty sure that the hard drive is dead.  Luckily, a new replacement drive is only about 25 bucks on eBay – definitely cheaper than buying another device.

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I finally joined the Tivo revolution after resisting it for so many years. It has been 5 months since I bought my refurb TivoHD from Tivo.com and so far so good.  I had a ReplayTV 5040 prior to this and it recorded many, many shows over the years. It even survived a lightning strike. No, not directly but thanks to a ghetto CAT5 cable going to the neighbor’s house (don’t ask), the ReplayTV unit got a little extra juice. Aside from a messed up hard drive, the unit lived on to record a few more shows. I ended up selling it on eBay and to my surprise, I still got nearly $400 for it.

TivoHD seemed like a logical replacement choice. After all, it has gained high acceptance among DVR users. It also has the one feature I wanted and that is the ability to record HD shows. The only thing that bothered me was the subscription fee. I ended paying the lifetime fee of $400 but if I crunched the numbers right, TivoHD should pay for itself after 21 months of ownership. That includes the savings from dropping the monthly cable box fees as well as the cost of the 1TB hard drive upgrade.

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