Rare Hitachi Digital8 camcorder review & test

Hitachi was the only other company besides Sony to make Digital8 camcorders, and they are very hard to find. This is the model VM-D965LA from the year 2000. It has some nice features and has fairly good video quality, but suffers from loud tape motor noise, and the image gets rather grainy in low light. Also the "16:9" mode is not true widescreen; it just puts black bars on the top and bottom of the 4:3 image.