Samsung SC-MX20 Camcorder

great camera, good quality, cheap price 34x zoom is a LOT and the picture displays well you can record up to 5 hrs if video with just an 8gb card the battery can last up to 3 hrs, or longer if you turn off the display it works fine with macs, and iMovie HD and 08 the only downside is the fact that you cannot record directly onto iMovie, that requires a firewire camera

This is a great little camera. Took a video, connected to my laptop, which looked at the camcorder as a USB storage device, opened it in a new window and just copied the MP4 to my desktop. I can play it as an MP4 from my desktop, but I opened Adobe Premier Elements and changed it to a Quicktime video (conversion took about a minute) which I can email to friends. I had no problem with video lag and I am wondering if the other reviewer may have inadvertantly put the camera in its time-lapse mode. I would say that the video is comparable to my Sony Handycam (for which I spent considerably more).

I bought this video camera for my daughters big 15th birthday party. I tested it a few times for the party recording some short clips and all looked well. The video was a decent quality, the sound was good. It looked nice on my 32" HDTV. Unfortunately all was NOT well. Any clip over approx. 5 minutes would drop frames, but continue to record sound... This is a big problem because the most important part of my daughters party was a 35 minute clip and in that clip there are dropped frames about every 3 minutes. So about 10 minutes into this clip the video and the sound are so far out of sync that it is painful to watch. By the end of the video the video is about 5 seconds ahead of the sound. This is totally unacceptable and I have lost a very important memory to a lousy designed camera. It is certainly conceivable that I got a lemon camera, but I tried it with multiple memory cards so it was definitely the camera's fault and not my media. Just ask yourself before you purchase if... Read more

I just wanted a little camcorder with decent quality. For the money you can't go wrong with the SC-MX20. It is so simple and straight forward. The only thing I don't like is that none of the common/standard media players can play mp4 format. Other than that I like it and am very happy with the quality of the video. I would recomend it. I did a lot of research on camcorders the ones with good reviews are $350 +. I decided to take a chance on this camcorder because it is so new there aren't many reviews yet and I am very happy with my choice.

I won't dwell upon the little things missing from such an inexpensive camcorder (viewfinder, for one). You expect to sacrifice some details when you strip a camcorder down to its bare essentials and sell it cheap (well, not really cheap but inexpensive). While you won't get DV quality video, you will get acceptable quality as long as you understand that you're shooting in a highly compressed H264. Editing your footage on your Mac is virtually impossible unless you convert it all to DV and edit it in iMovieHD (or use that iMovie'08 abomination). Personally, I use MPEG Streamclip to convert to DV, drop those conversions into iMovieHD, do my editing, and convert the "reference movie" using MPEG Streamclip so I get a nice H264 for my iPod or AppleTV. I would have given this camcorder 4 stars but there is a flaw in the firmware that neglects to give any of the better quality settings (the 16:9 footage that's better than the "YouTube" quality) the "16:9 flag" setting. So what you get i... Read more