placed under a flap beneath the LCD

Tag : snow shoe
placed under a flap beneath the LCD.


Unfortunately, the microphone jack isn't complemented by aheadphone jack or manual audio controls, so you won't be able tomonitor or adjust sound levels. There aren't many video settings toplay with, either. A button toggles manual focusing, which operatesvia the joystick on the LCD panel, while the Exposure button worksin a similar way, but combines shutter, iris and gain into one, sodoesn't offer much control. Other than that, there's a back-lightcompensation button, and four program auto-exposure modes in thefull menu to choose from - Portrait, Spotlight, Sand & Snow and LowLight.
This wouldn't be much of a limitation for the target audience ifimage quality took care of itself. However, this is only partlytrue for the BD70E. In bright daylight, it produces vibrant coloursand plenty of detail, although automatic exposure has a tendency toblow out bright colours, forcing the use of the Exposure control tocompensate. Under less clement artificial lighting it's a worsestory. Reasonable colour accuracy is maintained in low light, butthe level of grain is intolerably high.
The BD70E did fulfil its promise of immediate playback via Blu-ray- we were able to pull out the BD-RE disc we had been using andsimply pop it into a Panasonic DMP-BD50. Once the player hadfigured out what kind of media had been inserted, it got on withplaying the footage. However, while each clip had its own chaptermarker, there was no menu to browse - the clips simply played oneafter another. It's also worth noting that BD-R discs needfinalising before they will be recognised by a player.
While playback is a doddle, editing footage from the HD70E is a bitmore complicated. We found we couldn't simply insert the discs intoa PC Blu-ray drive to drag and drop files, nor could we hook up thecamcorder via USB. Instead, the bundled Pixela ImageMixer 3 HDsoftware is required to copy files off to a local hard disk via theUSB connection. After that, the footage becomes regular AVCHD MTSfiles, so are editable in any AVCHD-compatible app, which of coursedoesn't include Adobe Premiere Elements.
The Hitachi DZ-BD70E is likely to win a few friends amonggadget-lovers who want to enjoy HD home movies on their HDTVswithout any hassle. In this respect, it delivers on its promise.However, it's not the best HD camcorder around for the money interms of features or image quality - Canon's HF10 is cheaper and much more accomplished in either respect.
Media is still pricey, too, with 8cm BD-RE discs costing nearly