PureDigital Video Camera Review

Unicycles and Equipment
1

I recently saw the PureDigital Camcorder reviewed on DL.TV (http://dl.tv) and it seemed the perfect thing for uni/muni filming.

http://www.puredigitalinc.com/products/pandsvideo/index.html

It’s very lightweight, about the size and weight of my Palm Pilot. It only has a digital zoom, so things do get a bit grainy when you use it, but it’s also very light and tiny, making it much easier to carry then a traditional camcorder. It doesn’t have a tripod mount, but it’s light weight and size make it easy to prop up on things.

An interesting thing about the camera is that it has the software for very basic editing and downloading to a PC or Mac stored on it, you plug it into a USB slot and it starts the software on it’s own. You can use the included software to download the video off it, or navigate through the file manager to the folder and drag and drop the video files that way (no firewire record/settings crap!) Under Linux it uses USB Mass Storage, so it acts like any other USB drive.

Cons: Autofocus only, terrible zoom, can’t edit video onboard, only ~30min recording time. Only available at Target as far as I know. Supposedly proprietary video codec (can be downloaded for free for Windows) but works fine under Linux (Files identified as XVID format actually, and played under Linux no problem). No tripod mount.

Pros: Inexpensive ($130), decent video quality, ease of use, portability.

Here’s a short video I shot using it. Aside from the fade ins/outs no effects are used, and the music was recorded on the camcorder. It’s a large file because I wanted to keep it as uncompressed as possible so that you could see the image quality. Even so, the quality isn’t quite as good as the originals.

Oh yeah, and the riding sucks. I’m better at muni. I fall a lot here :smiley:

http://www.unicyclist.com/gallery/?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=203190

2

does it have expandable SD memory??

3

Nope, no SD card slot. There was another one there that did… but it also had image stabilization, a flip out screen, and some other features, for a lower price. I opted for the PureDigital one because I had actually seen a hands on review of it. Also, the SD card one only had 16M of internal memory, meaning I would have had to buy a new card immediatly…

4

How much space does it have on it and how much space did the demo video you made take up? That thing looks like a great deal! The quality was rather good!

5

It has 512 megs of storage, which deending on what yer filming comes out to about 30 minutes. The film I posted was about 27 Megs, but it’s NOT in the native format, that’s in the MS wmv format (I just set it to almost no compression). Native format is xvid, which means you have to install codecs to get it working, but that’s not hard (the camera actually has player software built in). It does mean that you might have to convert files when sending them to other people (which is what I should be doing now ;))

One problem I discovered yesterday is that because it is so light, it can be hard to hold steady. I’m gonna explore building a steady cam for it :slight_smile: