The Hitachi dvd camcorders DZHS300A is included with 8GB HDD that may record nearly 110 minutes of video at the highest quality.

Hitachi has a new concept that puts two robust recording formats into one camcorder. The hybrid series includes a hard drive disk (HDD) and a DVD recording drive, which gives consumer shooters a lot more flexibility. The DZHS300A comes with 8GB HDD that can record nearly 110 minutes of video at the finest quality. Let’s dive into Videomaker’s first ever hybrid DVD camcorder review.

You would expect when designing a camcorder with two different recording formats (SD Memory card excluded) that you’d find it nearly two times as big. But Hitachi has managed to hold the DZHS300A extremely thin and lightweight. The truth is, by just looking at this camcorder, you wouldn’t guess there’s anything more than the DVD section.

We found this hybrid Hitachi dvd camcorders to be very comfortable, even just in large hands. There’s easy access to buttons and controls and the 2.7″ wide screen format LCD was the ideal size just for this camcorder.

Controlling this Hitachi dvd camcorders was almost too simple. We half expected that there may be some exciting challenges one could face using the hybrid, but there really isn’t. Choosing your recording medium destination happens with the power switch. The brief time it took the DVD section of the camcorder to start up from the off position was impressive. And even more impressive was the HDD section. That could save you a few precious moments. Almost all Hitachi’s new DVD camcorder models also feature 1-Second Quick Start. This feature improves the recording start time from standby mode. Inside our tests, this worked flawlessly in the HDD mode and nearly flawlessly (it once took a fraction of second longer than 1-second) in DVD mode. Overall, we were very pleased with its operation, including the manual focus and manual exposure.

Although the manual controls are somewhat limiting (there’s no manual shutter speed), the Hitachi dvd camcorders DZHS300A has a long-reaching 25x optical zoom. This season we’ve certainly seen longer lens lengths on consumer camcorders, but we feel 25x is ample for many shooting situations. At this length, you’ll definitely need to consider a tripod, as the electronic image stabilizer may help smooth out jitter, however it won’t eliminate sea-sickening camera movement.

In the area of image quality, the standout performance originates from its color reproduction. For any single chip camcorder, we’re pleased to find out such vibrant colors that appear natural in well-lit scenes. In low-light conditions the image quality suffers from increased noise in dark areas of the image, and also the auto focus will drift much more, but not more than what we expect from a consumer camcorder at this price point. Furthermore, the compression artifacts in both DVD and HDD recording modes performed as what we expected.

The actual good thing about the hybrid camcorder is its flexibility, or being able to dub from HDD to DVD. Scenes recorded to the HDD can be edited (i.e., divide, delete, combine), sorted into playlists and dumped to DVD, all right in the camcorder. This simply means that you’re able to do plenty of in-camera editing, with the HDD footage as your source and dubbing a “program” to DVD. In real life, this implies making DVD copies for relatives and buddies doesn’t need a computer or nearly as much post-production time.