DInosaur Roar? The Samsung Full HD HMX-Q10 Camcorder

One of the things we seem to have accumulated in our house are pocket camcorders. We’ve got 3 different Flips, a Panasonic one and a couple of budget Disegos. I’ve also got an old fashioned Sony digital tape camcorder that now looks like it belongs in pre-history, which is a nice lead into the post really. But we didn’t have a Samsung Full HD HMX-Q10 Camcorder until the last weekend…

Samsung thought it would be a jolly good idea to ship a few bloggers off to Dinosaurs Unleashed at the O2 Arena (or to be more precise a static rigid tent right outside it) and arm them with a proper digital camcorder in the Samsung Full HD HMX-Q10 Camcorder (which we got to keep afterwards) to show us all what the difference between smartphone/pocket camcorder quality and a real camcorder actually is. And to scare the kids witless with dinosaurs of course. So we met up with Jen, Jamie and (eventually) Sally for some excitement.

I have produced a little video for you to have a shufty at here:

And watch it in high def here.

All the editing was done on our 5 year old Dell core duo laptop. It’s an old and fairly slow machine but it was just about up to the job of editing high definition video. The included software (installed on the camcorder itself) was very intuitive to use and pretty comprehensive. Obviously if you have better paid for software you’ll get better results but I really couldn’t fault it.

The one thing that Dinosaurs Unleashed didn’t unleash was much ambient lighting but I think you can see from the video that the Samsung Full HD HMX-Q10 Camcorder coped pretty well in the dimly lit exhibition hall.

The camcorder itself is dead easy to use. Opening the viewing screen flap on the side turns it on and if you forget to slide the protective lens cover switch, it tells you on screen. The operational beeps that every single camera or phone come with can be turned off and the menus are simple and easy to navigate. The camera does default to a slightly zoomed in position every time you start it but the Samsung bod did tell us that the firmware (the software that runs the camcorder) was about to be updated with some improvements, so perhaps that’s one of them.

The pictures are sharp and clear, even in 720p, which I changed the setting to as our telly doesn’t do 1080i. It’s a 4 year old Samsung telly, and we’ve had no problems with that either! All in all, it’s a cracking little camcorder that really shows the benefit of a proper device over a camera built into a smartphone. I was even surprised how much better it was than a high end Flip, for very little difference in cost.

I shall end with the technical specifications.