By Kyle MonsonRent or buy? That's the question these days for everything from real estate to music and DVDs. And with the price of even mediocre digital camcorders still too high for most folks, it was only a matter of time until a more affordable solution appeared.
CVS is the first to reach the market, with the One-Time-Use Video Camcorder ($30 street): You buy it from your local CVS drugstore, shoot your video, and return it to the store for processing to DVD (a $13 fee), after which CVS repackages it and sells it again. Think of it as renting with no late fees, or a disposable camera that CVS doesn't actually dispose of when you're done with it.
We took a look at the solution as a whole—the camcorder, DVD interface, and video output—to see how it stacked up against your typical digital camcorder. There were some pluses, such as the clean user interface, and some minuses, like the video quality and the limited (20 minutes) amount of footage you can shoot.
The main consideration here is price. We didn't expect to see the best video quality from an inexpensive reusable camcorder, and indeed we didn't. Of course, between the initial cost and the processing fee, you're paying more than $40 for 20 minutes of video clips. If you use the service more than a few times, you'd be better off saving up for a camcorder that's yours to keep. Then again, you can think of the unit as an auxiliary to your current camcorder and use it in places you wouldn't want to take a $1,000 piece of electronic equipment, like the beach or a campground.
CVS says that though they reuse the camcorders, they consider them purchased, not rented, so there's no fee if it comes back damaged (or doesn't come back at all).
The camcorder itself, made by Pure Digital Technologies, looks good, and the shooting experience is akin to that of the Sony DCR-DVD7—you hold the camcorder in front of you and use the LCD screen as a viewfinder. Though there aren't any extras like a light or zoom, the 1.4-inch screen is adequate, and the four buttons on the back—on/off, record, playback, and delete—keep things simple. The LCD image rotates when you turn the camera sideways or upside down. Curiously, the video you shoot doesn't rotate along with the LCD, so you can be fooled into shooting a bunch of upside-down footage. There's no tripod mount, though the square-ish camcorder is able to stand on its own.
You can play back your 20 minutes of video with sound and delete anything you don't want to keep. When the camcorder is full, return it to CVS for processing, which takes roughly 30 minutes. You don't get the camcorder back, but you do get a remarkably full-featured DVD with your footage. The video, which is encoded in MPEG-4 during shooting, is burned onto the DVD in MPEG-1, WMV, and VOB file formats, giving users plenty of options. You can play the video back on a regular DVD player or in Windows Media Player, or use the MPEG-1 version to edit the video footage using video-editing software. The included video-editing tool launches automatically in both Macs and PCs, and runs directly from the DVD, so there's no software to install.
The video-editing tool's user interface is as simple and intuitive as the controls on the camcorder itself, which is perfect for first-time videographers. Actually, it's much more streamlined than most interfaces we've seen for full-fledged video-editing software, which are often overly complex. Options, features, and a help index are all on the main page, so you won't have to go digging for the functions you want.
The video-editing tool breaks footage up into scenes automatically; every time you push Record on the camcorder, it starts a new scene. The Make Movie button threads selected (or all) chapters together into a continuous movie, and the Save for Editing button saves the MPEG-1 footage to your hard drive. You can easily add captions to the video clips, and we especially appreciated the playback timeline that let us easily navigate through the video clips.
Our favorite feature, however, was the Save for Emailing function, which lets you upload WMV video to the CVS Online Video Gallery Web site, which e-mails a link to your friends and family for viewing. (You specify who you want the video to go to before uploading it.) When recipients click on the link, it takes them to a Web page with the video and gives them the option to stream the content or download it. The video is saved online for 30 days. A similar process is used for sending video greeting cards.
So there are plenty of ways to use the video, but what of the video itself? Our PC Labs test results were about what we expected them to be. The color saturation was low, making for very dull reds and oranges, and yellows with a slight blue/green cast. Resolution was about half that of a normal camcorder—250 vertical lines of resolution and 200 horizontal lines.
The camcorder adjusted fairly quickly to changes in light, so there were very few blown-out whites. We saw lots of shimmering and stairstepping, though, especially when we walked outside and shot some real-world footage in the sunlight.
Naturally, the camcorder doesn't have image stabilization, so you're likely to experience motion sickness if you spend as much time watching the playback as we did. We also noticed a bit of jerkiness in the video, which looked like it was due to low frame rates. Pure Digital assured us that the camcorder shoots at 30 frames per second, but the footage still looked slightly hyperactive and the motion wasn't very smooth. Video quality was noticeably worse when we played the video on a television screen, with muddy colors and lots of artifacts. Audio quality was a bit tinny and muddled, but passable.
So the question remains: Rent or buy? If you're only going to be using the service a couple of times, the CVS One-Time-Use Camcorder is a good alternative to dropping a wad of cash on a camcorder you'll seldom use. Otherwise, look to a value-priced camcorder like the JVC GR-D33US for much better video quality and hardware you can keep.
DVD Camcorder .: Made for televideography and telephotography with ease.
