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I don’t know about you but I’m amazed at some of things you can buy for under $50 these days. For instance, I ran into a nifty camcorder the other day for under $50. I’ve never heard of the brand name DXG before but I checked into it and found that they have two offices, one in Taiwan and the other in the City of Industry, a little small industrial town just east of Los Angeles. They also have a manufacturing warehouse in Shenzhen, China, another up and coming city near Hong Kong. They say they employ over 4,000 employees worldwide and have been supplying electronics and parts to the bigger names. They don’t say who but I would think stateside. 

When I looked at their camcorder at close, I was reminded of my Sony Handycam model DCR-PC55 which I paid nearly $400 for a few years back. I can tell you if the DXG wasn’t so brightly colored (ie. metallic blue), I would have thought Sony produced it since they have been coming up with brightly colored digital cameras lately. Handling the DXG was nice. It wasn’t too heavy and definitely not bulky whatsoever. It feels just like my Sony, small enough to put in your coat’s pocket but too big to fit into a pair of tight jeans.

The DXG has 16MB of internal memory and uses SD cards to expand its memory. You can buy 1GB SD cards now for less than $10 and you can record about an hour’s worth of video on it and still have space for your MP3. And yes, the DXG is a MP3 player too and it comes with its own earphones. You can bring it to school and have it tape the prof’s voice because it is a voice recorder as well. The DXG only has 4X digital zoom, no where near what my Sony can do, at 120X. With the DXG, you’re supposed to be up close and personal with your subject anyways. You want to catch that moment then upload to YouTube and storing it in MPEG-4 allows you to easily transfer it to your PC. With the Sony, you need to connect it to the computer using firewire then upload it using a movie capture because the video is stored on a mini-dv tape in digital format but not recognizable by a PC. 

To power the DXG unit, four alkaline batteries are required whereas my Sony Handycam uses a lithium battery. Both units have a zoom, the DXG has a 4X digital zoom whereas my Sony has a powerful 120X zoom. But the DXG is far superior than the Sony in taking stills because it can capture 3.3 megapixels pictures versus only 2.0 megapixels in the Sony.

For under $50, the DXG-305V is perfect for beginners or budding videographers who wants to put together a quick music video of their band. If you want to bring it along on a trip, I think you need to spend a little more dollars and get something more serious.