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!

Other than a lack of a few manual overrides for things like shutter speed and logical film speed, the only other negative things I have to say are:

1) It forces too rigid controls on you for some of the more common things. Such as, take a photo and decide you don't want to keep it - to delete it you must first switch out of record mode and into play mode, access the menu, navigate to the memory option, locate the photo you just took and delete it. Then, to take another picture, you must switch back over to record mode (switching modes takes about .1 seconds to flip a switch, but for some reason the camera wants an addition 5 seconds to run a self-test or something before you can use that mode).

2) The LCD screen is not the greatest I've seen. Not bad, but just barely "good" quality. Playback of video or stills can sometimes result in noise, looking like mosaic squares or the occassional line. However, this is only on the LCD screen of the camera - videos and stills sent to a PC monitor, TV screen or printer (as appropriate) are all excellent quality.

I tried to replicate the problems quoted here in a previous review. I could not. I surmise the problems must have been due to either viewing on the LCD screen (already noted as being just barely "good") or due to bad recording media.

Specifically, I ran a panoramic recording of 2 rooms. Both were intentially lit in one corner but not the others. Both had large areas of white and dark patches, shadows under shelves and cabinets, objects up close and far away. I ran several pans of each room at different panning speeds. The ultimate speed was 1 revolution in 3 seconds - things moved by FAST!

The camera performed excellently with respect to exposure, rapidly changing with lighting conditions. Both rooms included the lighting source in part of the pans (i.e., I filmed the light bulb as it was burning). No problems. I could even read titles on books in the shadows of my bookshelves. I noted a slightly better result by using the "sports" setting rather than the automatic exposure, but the AE was still very good.

Of course, focus was a problem on the last, fast pan. 360 degrees in 3 seconds is too fast for any camera to keep up with. At more reasonable panning speeds, the camera focused absolutely A-OK.

As to a verical streak being recorded on zoom, the zoom is purely optical. The digital zoom value (up to 800x) must be set before recording starts and cannot be changed during recording. Any zooming during recording is optical, therefore, any vertical streak is probably the result of either (a) bad recording media or (b) the playback was on the LCD, not a PC monitor or TV screen. In short, the streak was either "real" and on bad media, or a "ghost" existing on the LCD but not truly recorded on tape.

For photos, color content is wonderful, if and only if the proper lighting is chosen. If you're indoors, choose indoors. Otherwise you will likely get a bit of blue or orange cast. Any PC software can adjust this, but using the correct setting is preferable. 4.3mp using superfine detail yields exceptional quality. Compared to a Canon G3's best photo, the DuoCam is noticably better.

The camera is complex. Not complicated, but complex. People who don't read manuals should not buy this camera.

For one camera to own and use, or if you need a travel camera on vacation or something, this is the one. Sure beats carrying a camcorder AND a still camera, and all in the size of a small to medium camcorder. It's not professional quality (then again, it's not $12,000 either), but it's getting close. Record video on tape or mediastick. "Snap" low-res stills to tape while in camcorder mode. Copy stills or individual frames from tape to memorystick. Continuous stills at 3/second. Lots more. Great quality, tons of features.

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.