Home > Consumer Reviews > Samsung SCD5000 DuoCam MiniDV Camcorder/4MP Digital Still Camera

The video quality indoors is absolutely horrible, even with the night shot features, and every possible combination of settings, etc. I tried really hard to find reasons to keep this camera. But in the end, the video quality was too horrible to justify it as a $... digital still camera.

Outdoors, the video was OK producing ever so slightly washed out colors, but here is the real problem. Moving between light and moderately dark areas of a small room produced horrible video. During playback you either got something that looked like pure night or the sun all in one room. The video recorder does not gracefully adjust between light and moderately light areas of a room. Occasionally when using the zoom, a pure white line would be recorded vertically as part of the video!!!!!

Now for the camera. One thing that annoyed me after a few minutes was the constant manual flipping of half of the device between still and video. I did a comparison between the Samsung still digital camera and my Sony 3.34 MP camera that I already owned. Disappointment again. Horrible color from Samsung (washed out colors). I was not impressed with the quality after comparing about 10 different pictures of varying light, indoors, outdoors, etc. Hands down the Sony 3.34 MB won.

I returned the Samsung camera and bought instead the Sony TRV70 for about the same price (I would like to have tried the TRV80 but $... more was just not in the cards for an 1" more LCD). What a difference. When it comes to color and light (indoors especially), Sony seems to have those two figured out. Awesome video recording indoors with the Sony. All around the video was so much better with the Sony. The still are not as good as my Sony 3.34 but if you can live with reduced picture size, the quality is pretty good (plus no manual flipping of half the device). I'll still probably take both the video and the camera on the next trip (pending cooperation from the wife). Really, if you ignore such frills as Bluetooth and Internet connectivity from within your camcorder (!!!), you can probably buy something much cheaper than the TRV70.

One day, we'll all carry one device that produces high quality video and stills. But for now, that day is not here yet.

This camcorder is a piece of junk. The low light is really horrible. The picture is grainy and the autofocus is slower than my grandma. Spend a little extra a get a quality camera...not this one!

I bought this when it first came out. I had only used it a few times in 3 years before the record and picture taking screen went completely black. In researching possible malfunctions, there were numerious with this model, but no recall. I wasted over $1,000.00 on this crap. PLUS, the photos are terrible, as is the recording and battery life.
Such a shame because I really like the general concept of this thing. I just refuse now to buy anything Samsung or any sister company makes. I do not have $1,000.00 to throw away, and that's what I feel I've done after I made this purchase.