Anybody know the story with the release of this camera? Everything I have read says August, but now August has come and gone and still no sign of it. This looks like a great budget camcorder and I'm anxious to hear some people's thoughts.

Anybody know the story with the release of this camera? Everything I have read says August, but now August has come and gone and still no sign of it. This looks like a great budget camcorder and I'm anxious to hear some people's thoughts.

Hi,,, I pre-ordered the Samsung SC-MX20 almost a month ago from Best Buy and BB says I will have it by Sept 10th (the expected date quoted when I pre-ordered it).

Im thinking I might get the MX20 early though as Best Buy pulled the money from my credit card a few days ago, and they most of the time dont take the funds untill right before they ship an item.

And yea, the MX20 does look like it will be a killer camera, if you have not been there yet, go on www.SamsungUSA.com and check out the new info and video they added last week about the MX20.

The same day I get the MX20 I will be posting test video from it on YouTube and Vimeo,, just do a search for "Davyo" to find the video.

I will also post here the day I get it as well.

I'm very much looking forward to getting the new MX20 !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cheers
Davyo

Thanks, Davyo. Can't wait to see the results!

an about face with it's big brother the sc-Hmx20, this camcorder has a TIme-Lapse mode in 1 to 30 sec per frame ... the Hmx20 has a 300fps slow-mo. there is video of it on goITworld and Smasung's microsite for this bugger
pretty slick
saw where it recorded a scene of a kitchen nook with some flowers and a clock. it showed the flower blooming ... pretty slick. would come in great to shoot the night sky , a building project, a cityscape with all the cars, sunrises and sunsets ... Iguess anything that takes hours to do ..... revealed magically in a matter of seconds

and unlike the cap on the Hmx20's slow-mo mode (what was it ? 10 secs?) Time-Lapse can be set to 24hours or even infinity! (or at least until your memory fills up)


what I dig

3hour battery !!
I really liked the Slow-Mo .... will probably like this 'Fast-Mo' (called Time Interval rec)
I'm seeing it as low as $199 for the black one and $212 for the red and blue
the Hyper DIS (stabilizer) looked good in a video I saw where the guy zoomed in to full 34x, handheld, onto lettering, that stayed in frame the entire time and never hit limit in the frame
NO TRANSCODING YOU SAY ? count me in!

I'm going to forget that it doesn't have 3cmos sensors like the new panasonics
or that nifty touch-screen found on the Sc-Hmx20
or it's slow-mo
or it's fabulous 1080p/30p .mp4 that my Mac played so well with

from what I've seen, it's probably the most you can possibly squeeze into a $250 camcorder, and probably more than you should get

I just got my Samsung SC-MX20 tonight and have a had a few hours to play with it,, so far I have to say I am very happy with the MX20.

As a matter of fact I cant think of anything bad to say about it.

The Time Interval feature is very cool, I recorded my cats running around the house at about a million miles an hour,, it was quite entertaining to watch.

Yea, for around $200.00 this thing cant be beat,,,, very cool camcorder.

In a few days I will post some video from it.

Cheers
Davyo

I just got one too and I'm having a lot of trouble with interlace artifacts. It's very severe.

I got this camera to make videos for the web. I had been using my camera (Fuji F50) and I was really impressed with the quality out of the camera for the web. It made avi files that I edited in Ulead Video Studio and uploaded to blip.tv. I don't need HD. It's really OK if motion is a little blurry and detail is lost. But the battery life of the camera was poor for video and it was awkward taking top down shots without being able to see the LCD. The MX20 seemed perfect for me.

The MX20 was so easy to use, my downloader program recognized the card files, and they loaded right up in Ulead, played in quicktime, VLC, etc, no problems.

But the interlacing artifacts were so bad! I told Ulead to treat it like NTSC and in the viewer it would blur out the effects so it looked better, but I haven't figured out how to save it so I can make a file that will play nice on PCs or in blip.tv. If I twiddle special settings in viewers (e.g. set deinterlace to blend in VLC) it looks OK, but I want something that will play like that for web viewers without special settings.

I tried uploading the raw mp4 to blip.tv. Here's one result:
go to website http://blip.tv/file/1248699

My camera only does 15fps and yes, of course, it pixalates/blurs out motion, but it's far less distracting than all the lines from the interlacing that the MX20 results in.

I've spent a few hours now trying to figure out how to fix it so I can get decent videos for the web without the distracting lines, but no luck yet. Suggestions?

If I can't fix this, I think my best option is to return it.

Update: Hmm. I also uploaded it to youtube (since they have youtube branding on the camera) and youtube recognizes it as an interlaced video and blurs out the artifacts. So maybe the problem is that an mp4 file with h.264 encoding at 60i is just too unusual and most editing programs and upload sites (other than youtube) can't deal with it yet? If so, that's still a problem since I don't want youtube to be my ONLY option.

I just got one too and I'm having a lot of trouble with interlace artifacts. It's very severe.

I got this camera to make videos for the web. I had been using my camera (Fuji F50) and I was really impressed with the quality out of the camera for the web. It made avi files that I edited in Ulead Video Studio and uploaded to blip.tv. I don't need HD. It's really OK if motion is a little blurry and detail is lost. But the battery life of the camera was poor for video and it was awkward taking top down shots without being able to see the LCD. The MX20 seemed perfect for me.

The MX20 was so easy to use, my downloader program recognized the card files, and they loaded right up in Ulead, played in quicktime, VLC, etc, no problems.

But the interlacing artifacts were so bad! I told Ulead to treat it like NTSC and in the viewer it would blur out the effects so it looked better, but I haven't figured out how to save it so I can make a file that will play nice on PCs or in blip.tv. If I twiddle special settings in viewers (e.g. set deinterlace to blend in VLC) it looks OK, but I want something that will play like that for web viewers without special settings.

I tried uploading the raw mp4 to blip.tv. Here's one result:
go to website blip.tv/file/1248699

My camera only does 15fps and yes, of course, it pixalates/blurs out motion, but it's far less distracting than all the lines from the interlacing that the MX20 results in.

I've spent a few hours now trying to figure out how to fix it so I can get decent videos for the web without the distracting lines, but no luck yet. Suggestions?

If I can't fix this, I think my best option is to return it.

Update: Hmm. I also uploaded it to youtube (since they have youtube branding on the camera) and youtube recognizes it as an interlaced video and blurs out the artifacts. So maybe the problem is that an mp4 file with h.264 encoding at 60i is just too unusual and most editing programs and upload sites (other than youtube) can't deal with it yet? If so, that's still a problem since I don't want youtube to be my ONLY option.


Humm,, I have had no problems at all with video or sound quality.

What I have done/been doing, is loading the video into my PC and then converting the MPEG4 files to MPEG2 to make the files Windows friendly.
I am also using Windows Movie Maker to do basic editing and every thing looks perfect so far.

I know I will be hated for saying this, but I like Movie Maker, and its all I need for the basic editing that I am doing at this point.

Cheers
Davyo

I know I will be hated for saying this, but I like Movie Maker, and its all I need for the basic editing that I am doing at this point.
Davyo

Yeah it's a good choice, but I want quick and easy multi-trim -- to cut multiple sections out of videos, readjust them easily, and restitch them together. Movie Maker lets you split videos, but if you want to go back and adjust the where the cuts are, you have to to reload another copy of the clip. Very time consuming. Muvee Reveal was the fastest for me, blazing fast actually, but it's also $100. I got Ulead Video Studio for $30 which is a bit slower (but still faster than Movie Maker) and it has multitrim clips that are almost as easy to use as Muvee.

But back to the MX20: If you go to the blip.tv URL I listed you can see what a raw upload (no editing) of a mx20 clip to a non-youtube site looks like. It's pretty sad that the MX20 limits you to youtube or forces you to run it through a deinterlacer of some kind (I'll give Movie maker a try for that purpose and report back).

OK, I tried using Movie Maker to convert and realized it doesn't do that (read mpeg4 files). So I converted them to mpeg2 (DVD-NTSC) as you did (I used Ulead video studio).

This resulted in a file that all my local PC players and editors were happy with and even though it is interlaced, they displayed it properly. Now the question, how to get it to a video hosting site other than youtube?

I tried uploading this large mpeg2 file to blip.tv and, alas, it still showed the interlace artifacts, see http://blip.tv/file/1249043

But, since my local players seemed happier with the interlaced mpeg2 file than the interlaced mpeg4, I tried reconverting to progressive wmv (de-interlacing it). Then uploaded this wmv. Bingo. This worked: http://blip.tv/file/1249083

Blip tv will also allow you to upload your own flash and it won't reconvert it, so I also converted the mpeg2 file direct to flash (1000 kbps) and uploaded it. That, naturally, also worked. but was about the same as the wmv: http://blip.tv/file/1249091

So I can get rid of the problem with a two-stage conversion (3 stages if you count the last one to flash done by youtube/blip/vimeo/google video et al and 4 if you count the MX20's compression via h.264). Not the best solution given that each stage introduces noise. But I can batch convert to mpeg2 first to save time.

I only wish Samsung had included a 30p option as well as 60i.

FYI, I put the raw file from the MX20 up at rapidshare for anyone who wants to see how it behaves with their viewers and editors:
http://rapidshare.com/files/144280471/SDV_0006.MP4.html

It's 50MB. It was taken at the highest quality setting the MX20 can do:720x480 "superfine". It's an mpeg4 file with h.264 encoding at 60i.

Also, I found a video editor that can properly re-encode from interlaced mpeg4 to progressive wmv in one step: Cyberlink PowerDirector. I uploaded that wmv to blip.tv for conversion to flash, here is their result:
http://blip.tv/file/1251259

At the end of that blip.tv file is a still extracted and de-interlaced from the video steam by PowerDirector. The resulting quality out of blip.tv was the best yet of my trials, avoiding the extra lossy mpeg2 encoding helps (and saves time and hassle).

In comparing the output of MX20 video with the video my digital camera produces (Fuji F50), I notice that the MX20 is much slower to adjust focus and doesn't have as good low light performance (the sensor in the F50 is bigger and it's known as a relatively decent low light camera).

I'm still deciding whether to keep the MX20. The only other camcorder I was considering is the much more expensive Canon HF100 (even though I only want to produce for the web). I decided against it when I read how hard it was to edit HF100 files and how long the battery life of the MX20 was. Now that I understand more about the format issues, I decided to download a sample .mts file from a HF100 and see what it was like to edit it. My software did handle it OK, but it makes the editing programs very slow and somewhat hard to use since realtime preview is slow and jerky. I much prefer the performance of the MX20's .mp4 files. And the MX20+PowerDirector cost is still less than half that of the HF100.

Thanks for the link to that sample clip. I played with the MX20 at BestBuy last week and only was able to shoot a minute or so. However, what I captured (and brought home because I shot it on my SDHC card) I liked.

Just got this today. It is charging so I haven't had a chance to play with it yet. Quick question...how much memory do the recording cards translate to? What I mean is if I get a 4gig card, how many hours of recording (in the best, non HD quality) get me? This is my first camcorder, so I obviously know nothing.

Just got this today. It is charging so I haven't had a chance to play with it yet. Quick question...how much memory do the recording cards translate to? What I mean is if I get a 4gig card, how many hours of recording (in the best, non HD quality) get me? This is my first camcorder, so I obviously know nothing.

That depends on your selection of 'Quality', but look at your owner's manual. It'll have a graph or table that shows exactly how much time a 4 GB card can hold.

Here is what I don't get. This camera is supposed to have a built in memory. Yet it always tells me to insert a memory card and whenever I try to change the settings for the Memory, I am unable to select the Memory option (it is blackened out). Everything I read says this camera has built in memory. What is going on here?

Here is what I don't get. This camera is supposed to have a built in memory. Yet it always tells me to insert a memory card and whenever I try to change the settings for the Memory, I am unable to select the Memory option (it is blackened out). Everything I read says this camera has built in memory. What is going on here?

Have you read the manual?

You could have downloaded it from Samsung in PDF format before you bought the camera.

This is what page 37 of the downloadable PDF manual says:
Using the built-in memory (SC-MX20C/MX20CH/MX20E/MX20EL/MX20ER only)Because this memory camcorder has an embedded memory, it is not necessary to buy extra storage media.So you can take or playback moving/recording conveniently.

Apparently the SC-MX20 does not have built-in memory.




Rich

Apparently the SC-MX20 does not have built-in memory.
I was afraid of that. All of the previews and early online reviews mentioned the built in memory but I don't even think they are currently selling that version here in the US.

Now I have to throw down $40 on a memory card and wait a week to see the recording quality. Oh well. I got a great deal on the camera though as now prices have jumped $50 from what I paid. At least I came out a little ahead.

Anybody know about SC-MX20E? Just saw it at QVC. It's built in 16GB memory. But can't find any more information about this model even not in Samsung website.

Anybody know about SC-MX20E? Just saw it at QVC. It's built in 16GB memory. But can't find any more information about this model even not in Samsung website.

Never heard of the SC-MX20E,,,,, the "E" might be a model just meant for QVC,,, just a guess though.

Cheers
Davyo

Anybody know about SC-MX20E? Just saw it at QVC. It's built in 16GB memory. But can't find any more information about this model even not in Samsung website.

Canon tries this on a number of their models, as well. They build in storage and think that this makes the camcorder worth $100 more than the ones that require a $20 storage card.

Canon tries this on a number of their models, as well. They build in storage and think that this makes the camcorder worth $100 more than the ones that require a $20 storage card.The built in memory has and advantage, you can easily and quickly copy a file to an other memory card, and give the card to another person or mail it off etc. A friend of mine does that in a business he is involved in, a great feature for him.




Rich

Hi,,, I pre-ordered the Samsung SC-MX20 almost a month ago from Best Buy and BB says I will have it by Sept 10th (the expected date quoted when I pre-ordered it).

Im thinking I might get the MX20 early though as Best Buy pulled the money from my credit card a few days ago, and they most of the time dont take the funds untill right before they ship an item.

And yea, the MX20 does look like it will be a killer camera, if you have not been there yet, go on SamsungUSA and check out the new info and video they added last week about the MX20.

The same day I get the MX20 I will be posting test video from it on YouTube and Vimeo,, just do a search for "Davyo" to find the video.

I will also post here the day I get it as well.

I'm very much looking forward to getting the new MX20 !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cheers
Davyo


Hey I see that you have (or had) a Samsung SC-MX20. That's my camera, too, and I'm having issues with how the recorded image plays back: in the camera's LCD screen, it looks amazing. Sharp and popping colors. but the .AVI files played back on the computer look horrible. Color is dull & awful and full of scan lines.

Does this sound familiar? If so, did you ever find any way to improve the ultimate image? Thanks. (I just joined this forum)

== DJ ==

Hey I see that you have (or had) a Samsung SC-MX20. That's my camera, too, and I'm having issues with how the recorded image plays back: in the camera's LCD screen, it looks amazing. Sharp and popping colors. but the .AVI files played back on the computer look horrible. Color is dull & awful and full of scan lines.

Does this sound familiar? If so, did you ever find any way to improve the ultimate image? Thanks. (I just joined this forum)

== DJ ==

Hi DJ,, and welcome to the forum.

Yes, I had pretty close to the same problems, scan lines and such,, and the worst problem I had was everything looks streched after being loaded onto my PC, by streched,,,I mean people and things I shot in 16:9 mode looked taller and thinner.
I tried everything I could think of to fix the issues, even converting the files to different formats,, but nothing worked,, very frustrating with everything looking so skinny,,,,,, only advantage is if your filming some one that was over weight.

I no longer have the MX20,, sold it on eBay.

The camrera's I now have,,, the Flip Ultra HD and the Vado HD,, both GREAT camera's and I be very very happy with them.

THe Ultra HD and the Vado HD put out some very nice looking video,,,I highly recomend either of those camera's if your looking for a small flash based kinda camcorder.

Hope that helps a bit.

Cheers
Davyo

I've had theMX20 since March and am very happy with it.

Yes, there are scan lines in the video as it comes from the camcorder. This is interlacing. Just run it through whatever you're using to edit your footage and de-interlace it. Problem solved.

Do verify that you're shooting at the best quality the camcorder has to offer and not the YouTube-quality.

the worst problem I had was everything looks streched after being loaded onto my PC, by streched,,,I mean people and things I shot in 16:9 mode looked taller and thinner.
I tried everything I could think of to fix the issues, even converting the files to different formats,, but nothing worked,, very frustrating with everything looking so skinny,,,,,, only advantage is if your filming some one that was over weight.

I found a way to stretch the 16:9 video out. Even though you got rid of the camera, maybe this will help someone else. There's an awesome freeware converter out there ("Any Video Converter") that will let you change the sizes of the MP4's that the Samsung shoots. So you can save the MP4's as 800 x 360, or 700 x 480 or whatever dimension. Makes them look like they do in the LCD screen.

That was a big hump for me to get over. Now, I'm working on the interlace/dull color issues. I'm going to try and capture the video in realtime using a video capture USB thing I just ordered. Since the video looks great played back from the camera on a TV, maybe I can reproduce that quality on the computer. Will report.

I found a way to stretch the 16:9 video out. Even though you got rid of the camera, maybe this will help someone else. There's an awesome freeware converter out there ("Any Video Converter") that will let you change the sizes of the MP4's that the Samsung shoots. So you can save the MP4's as 800 x 360, or 700 x 480 or whatever dimension. Makes them look like they do in the LCD screen.

That was a big hump for me to get over. Now, I'm working on the interlace/dull color issues. I'm going to try and capture the video in realtime using a video capture USB thing I just ordered. Since the video looks great played back from the camera on a TV, maybe I can reproduce that quality on the computer. Will report.

MPEG Streamclip (free) will let you alter the proportions, deinterlace it (which will remove the scan lines), and convert it to almost any other format. You can find it at www.squared5.com.

The problem is that Samsung's implementation of the wide-screen flag is flawed. Many apps don't recognize it (but Apple's iMovie08/09 does).

MPEG Streamclip (free) will let you alter the proportions, deinterlace it (which will remove the scan lines), and convert it to almost any other format. You can find it at www.squared5.com.

The problem is that Samsung's implementation of the wide-screen flag is flawed. Many apps don't recognize it (but Apple's iMovie08/09 does).

Thanks. I'll try that STREAMCLIP.

Nothing I tried helped so I built my own. You can download it at samsungscmx20.blogspot.com