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Best Camcorders Under $200 6

by Thomas Houston on September 8, 2008 at 06:02 AM



DXG-567V HD

What Is It: Much like the Flip, the DXG-567V HD is a boxy rectangle meant to be held vertically for shooting. The trappings are here in full force -- the camcorder has just a few buttons, has the obligatory pop-out USB arm, and it runs on two AA batteries.


What we like: The DXG-567V HD offers HD resolution for under $200. We do like that the DXG comes with a SD card slot, which will let you swap out memory cards as soon as it's full instead of having to download the video to your computer. Once you record your footage, transferring, editing, and viewing your footage on your computer is easy with the built-in USB arm. Also, the DXG comes in four eye-catching colors (pictured, above).


What we don't like: After searching the instruction book for half an hour, we were finally able to figure out how to bring up the menu to edit settings: Press and hold the 'delete' and 'play' buttons. Sure that may seem unintuitive, but the buttons themselves are even more infuriating: They're mapped onto what looks like an iPod scroll wheel, which doesn't actually function as such. It may be possible, but we weren't able to turn off the camcorder's beep function, so every action is accompanied with a loud beep.

Interface and build quality complaints aside, we found the image quality just wasn't that good. The colors were consistently off, our footage was full of noise, and we were rarely able to get a good, clear shot. Finally, the display on the back of the camcorder is too small, and makes reviewing footage difficult.


Final verdict: Obviously, all sub-$200 camcorders are not created equal, but the DXG-567V HD sadly seems to be a case of rushing a Flip-look-alike to market. Sure, it offers HD shooting capability, but we'd recommend looking at Kodak's Zi6 or DXG's 569V HD as budget-priced HD alternatives if you're really clamoring for high definition video.

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