The SC-D372 looks to attract solely through its $160 price. You can switch it on, point at something, and shoot – the auto mode will do its job. The video it records is a different story. - bad image quality and hard-to-use controls make this camera a very bad choice... for literally anyone. Look towards Canon's ZR800, with its microphone input and much better images.



A single 0.68 megapixel CCD sensor of unknown size captures images of disappointing quality. Color rendering and video clarity are bad both outside and inside, in low, medium and sunny light conditions. Noise overwhelms the image in low and medium light conditions, which describes almost all indoor spaces. Outside, highlights blow out almost invariably and there is loss of saturation.



The lens has a long 37x zoom, opens up to f1.6 and can be manually focused. Shutter speeds can be manually set in 8 steps between 1/60 and 1/10000.



The D372 is light and plasticky even by low-end camcorder standards. It's 2 inches wide, under 5 inches in length and 3.5 inches tall. Its native 16:9, 2.7-inch LCD has 112,000 pixels. The 0.3-inch 123,000 pixel viewfinder is 4:3 and squeezes the image when in 16:9 mode (which doesn't change the final output, only the experience; but to be fair, the D372's target audience prefers LCDs to viewfinders).



For shooting in low light, a slow shutter mode and an LED video light are provided, but good luck browsing through the menus to activate them. An onboard microphone records audio, and no support for external microphones is available. Battery life is about 80 minutes, and video transfer to a computer is done through Firewire.