Early generations of DVD camcorders were clunky, half-baked efforts at taking advantage of the inevitable onslaught of DVD in the home. It took a few years before a DVD camcorder arrived that could even remotely compare to a miniDV camcorder with regards to usability, handling and quality. Hitachi deserve credit for persevering with the format over several model generations, and investing a lot of time and resources to create a DVD camcorder that could compare favourably with the best miniDV tape camcorders available. The DZ-MV730E is such a device.

The DZ-MV730E records video to either rewritable DVD-RAM discs or to write-once DVD-R media. DVD-R media is the most compatible with many home DVD players; Panasonic DVD recorders and a very few players are able to read DVD-RAM discs.

In good lighting conditions, the DZ-MV730E performs very well, producing sharp, accurate colours with its 800,000 pixel CCD. It can take 10 to 20 seconds to initialise and catalogue a disc before it's ready to shoot; however, this is normal for the format and common with most other DVD camcorders. Once prepared, the camcorder automatically finds the empty space on the DVD, so there's no need to worry about overwriting important scenes, as is possible when recording with tape. The camera also supports SD media for stills.

A bright 2.5" LCD works well even when recording in bright sunlight, or you can use the optical viewfinder if conditions get too bright. It has a 16X optical zoom.

The Hitachi DZ-MV730E is a very good DVD camcorder that is much more user friendly and much less clunky than the early generations of DVD based camcorders; getting the price below the $1000 mark also makes it an attractive proposition.