WHILE Samsung is not famous for its camcorders, the VP-HMX20C will give established brands like Canon a run for their money. In fact, it is a real bargain for its price.

The camcorderis stout and weighs almost 0.5kg for a good reason: A wallop of features reside in it.

Check out these credentials - a large 1/1.8-inch CMOS sensor that records at 1,920 x 1,080 pixel resolution, a 10x optical zoom and a 2.7-inch touchscreen LCD.

A special high-speed capture feature takes up to 10 seconds of video at 250 frames per second (fps), which is great for slow motion playback of golf swings, dancing and other fast-action motion.

Since it records in the common H264 format, footage is playable on applications such as Apple's Quicktime. This gives it a slight advantage over the new AVCHD format, which requires you to install a new codec (or format). In any case, a Cyberlink DVD suite is included for video editing.

Overall, the VP-HMX20C gives a solid performance with quick focusing and a quick two-second start-up time. Video quality is crisp and sharp when viewed on a television.

I especially like its touchscreen LCD, which lets me point at the spot on the screen that I want the camcorder to focus on when filming.

The hand grip can be swiveled out, allowing you to hold the camcorder like a pistol. This means that weird angles - like shooting tiny things like an insect on a flower petal - is possible.

Storage capacity is a downer though - a paltry 8GB built-in flash memory that is good for 71 minutes at the highest resolution.

A 4GB card is thrown in but you'll need to add an SD memory card of, say, 32GB, to ramp up to about five hours of recording time.

Also, do note the maximum cap of 3.5GB per clip.

Final say

An impressive camcorder from Samsung that is packed with handy features.

By Melvin Seah, who works in the IT industry.

This story was first published in The Straits Times Digital Life on 31 December 2008.

For more The Straits Times stories, click here.