 I've found these reviews very useful, so I thought ... Strengths: Greatly extends the life of my camera, which is why I bought it. Also has firewire connectivity, which is essential for a home digital editing suite.
Weaknesses: Does not reliably play all mini DV tapes. Has even worse time with DVCAM tapes - and one of the main reasons I bought it was because it claimed to have this feature.
Summary: I've found these reviews very useful, so I thought give back a little and help out my fellow pricegrabbers:
If you're looking at this deck, you are probably a video prosumer or beginner-professional, looking to get a nice deck that will firewire-connect to your computer, thus saving the life of your video camera. One look at the lowest-end pro deck puts a lump in your throat, because they're $3000, right? So you figure you can buy this nice-looking deck for $800, and problem solved, right?
WRONG.
I did and I'm paying the price. It falls short. It misreads tapes constantly and is constantly telling me to clean the heads. I get little blips or worse blips on captured video all the time. I capture the same footage using my camera, and it looks fine.
Also, I get DVCAM tapes sometimes in my line of work. Mini DV cameras won't play a DVCAM cassette, which is another reason I bought this deck. It claimed to have DVCAM capability. Whoops! It's even worse on DVCAM than it is on Mini DV.
There's other annoying functional/menu issues, but these are the biggies. I'm going to have to save up for a pro deck. Anyone want to buy one used?
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