Unable to produce clear human features, and bad for YouTube

Author's Rating:

Pros: Good color, great sound quality, easy to use

Cons: Human features will be consistently blurry, bad software for editing and uploading to YouTube

The Bottom Line: 
I can not recommend this to anyone because it does not film human faces well, even from short distances.

Author's Review
I recently purchased this camera as an attempt to upgrade from my $50 Aptek camcorder.  I am a professional dancer, and wanted a camera for filming myself and uploading short clips to YouTube. I needed crisp video, vivid colors and good sound quality.  I carefully read reviews, watched test videos, and decided this seemed like a camcorder within my budget that would do the job.  I was so wrong!

When my camera arrived I immediately went to film at 1pm, the hardest time of day to film.  I came home and uploaded to YouTube only to discover that everything I had filmed was very blurry, especially in the face area. (It had all looked fine on the small video screen.)  It did not seem to matter whether I was filmed from a distance of 12 feet or 100 feet.  I attributed this to the time of day and extremely bright light and decided to do some indoor testing.  The next day I filmed indoors from a distance of 14 ft, and experienced the same results.  My $50 camera had always given me very clear results, so I assumed I had a defective model.  The camera was returned, another arrived shortly, and the video quality is exactly the same.  I tried every kind of light and camera setting available, and all came out as unable to produce clear human features.  Even from a distance of 14 feet the facial area is not clear enough to film a short lesson in which you can see a person's entire body. I was extremely disappointed and am returning the camera for a refund. 

I went and looked through more test videos, specifically of people and noticed that human facial features are definitely always lacking in quality.  This camera may work for those who are filming animals or outdoor landmarks from a distance, because the zoom is great and the colors are amazing. The sound quality was also very good-able to pick up a loud stereo from a distance of at least 50 feet. The camera was very easy to use and fairly intuitive to operate, not something I can say about many products. This was almost the camera of my dreams!  Unfortunately for those filming family members and such, this is a terrible purchase.  I also can not recomend buying this is you want to create YouTube videos, see below for specific reasons.

YouTube uploaders, run away from this camera!  Videos can be uploaded straight to YouTube with the supplied software, which is a great feature.  But getting your videos ready with this software is very difficult and the software lacks handy basic features. The editing I do is so simple that I usually use Muvee maker-generally I just cut small portions off, incorporate a soundtrack, and add title slides. The software that comes with this will only allows a title that will appear on top of your video.  I generally have a "Title Slide" followed by " Visit My Website Slide" that I do not want appearing as words over my dancing-the effect is distracting and unattractive.  The only slides allowed by this software are the title and ending credits.  You can not add more than 1 title slide at the beginning, nor can you put a slide in middle such as "New Location" or "Explanation of Time Lapse".  I eventually was able to pull footage from the camera in the provided software, save it, then pull that into Muvee maker.  The videos that are created should be converted to a different format for uploading purposes because they are huge! I did not want to purchase a converter, and could not find a free one online, so it literally took a few hours to upload a 6 minute video.  This really becomes an issue if you have multiple videos to upload or just don't want to spend all day babysitting your camera. 

All in all, this was almost the camera I needed, but it failed in crucial ways.  Despite ease of use and some neat features, I would not recommend it to anyone.