Mustek DV3000

My name is Jeff I'm 53 I have owned Mustek products before.this didgital cam was a treat for me. It was made in 01 this particiular one is the dv3000. I purchased it from a military couple from florida. Yes I would buy several cams for gifts. Since phones come with cams and other feachers it really brought the price of cams down. U can still shell out the bucks for a pro cam. For now Mustek offers a very affordable personal cam with plenty of feachers mem. And great for gifts!

i got my Mustek DV3000 about 4 weeks ago and i must say it is very good. it is very good value for money. it comes with everything i needed. the camera mode is a lot better than the movie mode. the picture quality is very good. it would be better if it had a flash of course but the night shot mode is alright but does not work very well on movie mode. it is my first digi cam and am very pleased with it. i would recommend it to anyone who wants a good value for money digital camera/digital camcorder. although don't buy it just for the camcorder as it is not all that brilliant.

I just got my Mustek DV3000 camera today. It's my first digital camera and i must say im very impressed. it comes with everything! It has loads of great features and is really easy to use. For its size everything is really easy to get at and well laid out. I recommend this to anyone.

Having a proper DV camera is all well and good, but with the Mustek DV3000 Digital Camcorder being this cheap means you can get video shots in dodgy situations where the camera might get damaged, and not be too gutted when it gets smashed. I'm going to strap one to my Downhill bike and ride down the Alps. Then try car, motorbike, RC plane, or throw it off a cliff with a parachute!!! wouldnt do that with a grand camera until im alot richer.....

Took on trip to Colorado mountains. Used for video riding through mountain roads and along- the-road stops. Only question I have, is why I'm not getting as much video time as others seem to get. Have a 256MB secured digital card and only got about 40 minutes recording time. Others seem to be getting that with 128MB card. e-mail me at [email protected], with any suggestions. Other than that I'm pretty happy with the camera for the price.

The first thought I had when I opened the box was that it was the smallest thing I had ever seen. You see those L'Espion cameras that are like matchbox size, but produce poor pictures. This one might be worthwhile. For the money, it seems worthwhile, and is all around very good.

Though there are a few limitations. You need a rather large SD or MMC card to hold any good length videos on the higher setting (9 minutes low, 4 minutes high on a 32MB) It doesn't tell you how much space is left on the card and it doesn't have an optical viewfinder, so you have to use the lcd screen, but the battery life is good with it, so that's only minor. There doesn't seem to be a way to set the date on it either, all my pictures say year 2009. There's no close up feature so pictures have to be at least 0.5-0.7m for an clarity.

If basic features such as memory left and a date setting could be used, then it is a solid buy, otherwise, it falls slightly short.

This camera is fine - gotta hold it still to get a decent picture - quality is good but doesn't matter these days anyway - just bring pictures onto your computer and edit away until you have a

masterpiece!! I recommend this as a simple camera-maybe a good first digital camera thats easy to use but dont expect the world -

For around $160.00 for the Mustek DV3000, its great. Im not sure what folks expect, but, i must say, it definitely outperforms my expectations.. you can pick up, a video editor program, to lighten inside shots...

also, you may want to get the

windows media converter, and make the "avi"'s

"wmp", to save space....

i am quite pleased with it..

When I saw this DV3000 camera advertised it seemed to be spot on for what I wanted. A cheap video capable camera, which I wouldn't be scared to put on my biking helmet/attach to my power kites, or whatever that I'm not about to do with my Sony MiniDV camera.

Thusly I ordered and duly it arrived.

You've probably read that the video resolution isn't great, and it's not, but it depends what you want to do with the files. For websites the 320x240x10/15fps is fine, it keeps file sizes down and people can watch even if they're unlucky enough to be on 56K or less! (Broadband rules!) That said if you plug it into the TV using the supplied cable its perfectly acceptable, in the UK normal TV resolution is just over 500 lines anyway so there's not much of a problem with pixelation.

Still photos are OK, at all 3 resolutions, but I prefer to stick to the middle res which is the 2Mpixels native of the camera, not really much to be gained by going for the highest resolution as it's not getting any more information from the real world, but filling in the gaps itself!

Running Windows XP on my PC it instantly found the camera as a removable drive, you can then just use explorer to copy the avi (video) and jpg (still) files onto your PC. Turning it into a PC cam just requires pushing the mode button and maybe installing the required drivers first time. The mike doesn't work on the camera in this mode, but that's more likely to be due to the fact that getting mikes to work through USB in general is tricky, not actually sure I know of any dedicated webcams that have inbuilt mikes, but I could be wrong.

I took the DV3000 to a mountain bike race this weekend and having mounted it on my helmet with copious amounts of gaffer tape now have some very acceptable video clips.

I put a 128MB card in it and that gives me about 1hour at lowest quality video, this seems to vary depending on how much the image changes. (I ran it in low light, which came up pretty dark and got 1h15, but then I ran it in the daytime and only got 45mins!) Must be something to do with the compression it uses.

To sum up.

This camera is unlikely to help you win any oscars, but as an inexpensive, lightweight video capable camera for those times when the main image taker stays in its bag, it does the job for me!

I didn't put the low res video in as a downside for one simple reason at this particular time, what do you want for the money? If you want a camera for important events this isn't it, spend more on a dedicated machine. This camera has allowed, and will continue to allow, me to get video footage from places I would previously never have considered. That to me makes it a fantastic thing.

Hope this review isn't too rambling and helps you a bit.

If I had not thrown away all the packing material, I would have returned the camera. Lighting compensation is poor and you must be in a perfect light situation. I have seen better pictures from under 1 meg pixel than from this 3.1 meg camera. Save your money