Digilife DDV-S670

Here is another of the digital video cameras in my collection. This is the DDV-S670. What a wonderful name. Here is the Digilife page for the DDV-S670

The 670 is a very interesting camera. It looks and acts somewhat like a cell phone, you unfold it, which automatically turns it on. you normally hold it horizontally to take pictures landscape, but you have tohold it vertical when you take video, or you will have ot watch your videos while laying down. The display swivels so you can take pictures of yourself. There is a three position focus selector, landscape, groups and portraits. This works pretty well, you just have to remember to select the right one before snapping the picture, or it will be blurry. Mostly this was a problem when i wanted to take a picture os something fairly close, and I forgot to select the right mode. This is a common problem with these fixed focus cameras, you just have to have a brain. The 670 runs off of an NP-60 Li battery, which was easy to get at Fry's Electronics for around $20. It is very worth while to have a spare battery, even though the battery life of this camera is very good. I could record over an hour of video on a charge.

The 670 does have one peculiarity that could drive you nuts. It defaults to being a video camera, so when my wife tried to take pictures with it, she was always taking video of peoples feet, because she didn't realize she needed to select photo mode. She would think she was taking a picture, and the camera would continue to record video of whatever she was pointing it at. This is a shortcoming that some cameras overcome by defaulting to the last mode you were in when you turn them off. I'm sure she would have learned to use it eventually, but it was my camera, so she only touched it occasionally.

The one fairly serious weakness of the 670 is that since it uses only the LCD screen for viewing while taking photos or video, it can be very difficult to video in bright light, since you can't really see the screen under daylight conditions. This would tend to imply it was best used indoors. Indoors, it worked ok in normal room light, but if the light level is low, it has no night mode, so basically you just get a dark screen. unlike the iJoy, it uses the traditional electronic flash, so youcan't use the flash while recording video, just photos.

Video recording was at 640x480, and claims to be 30fps, but I think it drops at lower light levels, producing the expected smearing.

The 670 has a digital zoom, which was mostly useless. Like many digital zooms today, it would just throw away parts of the picture to pretend to zoom, resulting in no more actual detail in the image than if you did not use the zoom. It had the same problem when using video, the image would just get more pixely when you zoomed. Some of the more modern cameras are starting to use simulated optical zoom when you are shooting video. What they do is use all the pixels of the sensor and downsample to 640x480 to save, so when you szom, it just uses a smaller portion of the sensor, but it is still using more than a 640x480 portion of the sensor, so the video quality is still good. For the technically inclinded, it is a question of whether you zoom before you downsample or not. Older cameras downsample then crop to zoom, newer cameras crop to zoom then downsample. The difference is night and day, newer cameras can zoom digitally and actually get more detail in the resulting image as you zoom, just like a real optical zoom. Isn't technology wonderful.

Dispite it's limitations, I liked the 670 a lot. It protected it's screen by folding up. It had good battery life, and used a battery you could actually buy. The image quality was decent, probably around 3MP, though they advertized 6MP. The color quality was good. It was lots of fun to use, and best of all it records in AVI format, so it can be converted to work with the macintosh. You can get a little more than an hour of video recording on a 1GIG SD card.

Conclusion: All in all, I think this is decent camera, it has good battery life, it works with a Macintosh, search the web for the FFMPEGX and MovieGate software. It is rugged, and take pretty good pictures. It also has three focus positions, which makes it more generally useful that some of the other fixed cameras I have tried.

Rating: *** out of 5