Hitachi VME565LA 8mm Analog Camcorder

I recently bought one of these as a cheap, economical camcorder, and overall I like it. It is very low light sensitive and produces good images with the gain up AE function. The front light will illuminate dark areas like daylight, but it will kill the battery fast. Controls are handy and are well placed, except for the manual focus control, see notes below. Battery life is decent, I get around 60-70 minutes continuous recording with the supplied Li-Ion 1350 mAh. Special effects include 16X9, Neg-Positive, Half Mirror, Art, and Mosaic modes. The 22x zoom lens functions very nicely, and usually auto focus works as it should, but in some situations bright side- lighting seems to fool it. The 500x digital zoom is mostly a gimmick, as all digital zooms are, but they can be useful up to say, 40x. After that, the image is nothing more than magnified pixels. Tape loading and unloading works well, however there is no soft eject, the door will slam open while ejecting the tape, It's a good idea to cushion it with your hand as it comes out of the camcorder. The flip out LCD is on the small side but it refreshes very quickly, and is bright enough for everything but bright sun. Image mirrors when flipped forward, and it has brightness controls. The transport control button is placed in a good location, better than membrane type buttons. The "Stable Pix" electronic stabilizer works well, even to 22x zoom, however it degrades the resolution enough to notice. The viewfinder is on the cheap side with a plastic lens which gives a purple fringe around the borders of the image inside, but it does work and has a diopter adjustment ring. Things I would have changed in the design include:

The silver painted finish.. I do not like it and always wondered why manufacturers use this paint, especially on black plastic! Any scratches look much worse. Would be much better molded in black no painted textured finish.

The word "Digital" displayed prominently on this Camcorder may lead buyers to believe it is digital, however it is not, though it does have some digital processing, for fades and other effects. It isn't a Digital8.

The metal focus ring gives the illusion of being able to be used as a manual focus, not so. It is only decorative. Manual focus is done by pressing the two rear mounted volume buttons at the same time, located at the rear of the camcorder. It would have been much easier with a thumwheel on the side of the unit as seen on Sony or Samsung machines.

The tape door doesn't have a view window so a person can look at the cassette inside to see how much tape is left.

Battery must be charged on the camcorder, so cannot use camcorder while charging battery. Would be better with external charger, but most other camcorder makers are using this cheaper method.

The tape transport is on the slow side; it takes a few seconds to go from pause, rewind, forward, so it isn't an editor's delight. When ending a recording session and turning the camcorder back on, there may be a 3 or 4 second gap between recordings as the camcorder seems to forward the tape enough to make a blank "gap."