Mustek DV4000 MPEG-4 7-in-1 Multifunctional Digital Camcorder w/1.5-inch LCD and 4x Digital Zoom

Having used this camera for appprox. 3 months I have had little occasion to use it for any other tasks than as a video camera.
I like to carry it with me at all times due to it's small size.
Overall, as an occasional user, I consider the Mustek DV4000 good value for money. Although some of the printed data may look very promising, please, do not expect the video resolution associated with some of the more expensive cameras. I found that the image quality does not just depend on the number of pixels, but on many other things (quality of the lens etc).

Posititive Qualities:
The Camera provides fairly good results on high resolution,- providing you are happy to put up with the high res. setting at 10fps as this tends to accelerates the speed of people walking or driving by.
The low light setting is helpful for indoor takes, even though the resolution is impaired.
The AEL Setting can be very userful for situations with exteme contrast, to select the area that should be correctly exposed.
The quality of the sound is remarkably true to reality.
I found the digital zoom to be very useful,- on the high res. setting,- however not beyond zoom ratio 1:2 (or there about)
The Sound Setting has shown itselve to be remarkable sensitive,-rather better than some of the analogue systems tried on other models.

Negative Qualities:
I did not consider the lower and medium resulution settings very useful,--the image quality was sadly lacking, (not what you might expect from a moder digital camera),- even though there may be benefits for imaging on computer screens. The 30fps for the low reolution settings are certainly a bonus when it comes to showing up movements.
When it comes to the performance of a still camera I am not convinced even though the results are acceptable;- my Olympus C300 Zoom gives better results.
The absence of optical zoom is a disadvantage,- a digital zoom can never make up fot this.

Recommendation: Select a flash card of adequate capacity, as the one supplies will not be adequate. Using a 128mb card, the high resolution video capacity of my camera provides approx 25 min.videotime.
For taking videos indoors during nightime, please ensure adequate lighting so that you don't have to go into to low light level mode.

Pros:
-Low price. Its only around $150 while the other top brand will cost you more $$$.
-Small size. It fits in your palm and easily in any pocket
-Looks good. The appearance of this little unit looks high tech.
-Mp3 player is nice. While don't expect top quality speakers, the sound output from the external speaker is acceptable, and you can also use head phones. 512MB sd card can hold quite a few songs.
-Video quality is decent. With resolution of 352 x 288, it runs at 30 frames per second. This is the highest for the current tapeless camcorders around this price range today.
-Battery life is good. One charge seems to last a whole day.
-Easy to view. Simply plug into tv and you can watch your videos or pictures

Cons:
-Poor still shots. Under the camera mode, the still shots at 2 or 4 mega pixels are not very sharp. When comparing shots taken from my canon s300, there's huge difference.
-No flash and needs light. Video and pictures will need external light or else it'll be dark.
-Digital zoom is not very useful. Because every time I try to zzom, the picture quality seems to suffer.
-Video at 640x480 is not very good, because its only 10 frames per second. So it's better to stick with the lower resolution at 30 frames per second.

I haven't mess around with the software that it came with, but I can just plug it into the pc and it shows up as an external drive, so I can just drag and drop the files. I'm a fan of pocket size gadgets, and I plan to keep the DV 4000 for a few months until maybe the Samsung ITCAM7 with 1.5 GB HD comes out. The gap between camcorder and digital camera is narrowing, and it's just matter of time a true all-in-one unit will appear on the market.

The bottom line is if you need to get high quality pictures or videos, you probably will need to fork out a bit more money to get something else. But if you are like me, just want the convenience of carrying a light weight camcorder in your pocket, this unit will do the job.