Seree / Sere HDV-301 Camcorder
The Good
- Decent battery life
- Bright screen
The Bad
- Video stutters and lags and is nowhere near HD
- Touch screen is largely unresponsive
- Battery clip broke on first use
- Films in AVI format, which means big files and poor quality
- Digital zoom does not operate smoothly
- Clunky handling
- Advertised as HD / 24 MP but is neither HD nor 24 MP
Build Quality & Appearance
On first glance, the camera looks like any other camcorder. It feels a little plastic, but otherwise it’s not too bad. The first issues became apparent when I opened the camera: the little clip that holds the battery in place snapped right off. To get the camera to work for the rest of the review I needed to tape the battery in place. It was a forewarning to what I would see in the next category:
Video Quality
Calling this camera HD is a joke. It is nowhere near capable of HD video. Inside is a Sunplus processor that was designed for standard definition. It was never made for even 720p. Needless to say the video the camera takes looks awful. It jumps and stutters and lags with any sort of action. Transitions between dark and light sections are not smooth. There is a decent amount of detail, but it quickly becomes lost in oblivion as frames blur together. Night video is worse than day, too. The digital zoom is choppy and jumps in segments instead of being smooth.
Photo Quality
The still photos this camera takes are nowhere near 24 MP. The sensor inside is only 5MP. The photos look OK, surprisingly. Almost good, were they not such low resolution.
Battery Life
The battery on the camera held up surprisingly well despite being taped in. I was shocked to see it last almost an hour of filming with the screen on, playing with menus and adjusting settings. Considering the otherwise poor quality this part was actually acceptable.
Screen, Buttons & U.I.
The screen looks good but the touch input basically doesn’t work. The buttons on the camera are no intuitive to navigating the user interface. It makes things difficult for set up and use of this camera.
Conclusion
I don’t use the word terrible lightly, but I really dislike that a company thinks they can get away with this blatant false advertising. The worst part is that the Amazon reviews on this camcorder are generally positive. The standard def mode does work fine, and were it advertised as a standard definition camcorder it would be ok, but because it is advertised as HD ready and the video is such a useless mess, I cannot under any circumstances recommend anyone buy this camera. Get a cheap mobile phone that does HD video instead. For the money its quality will be vastly superior to this device.
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