My New Toy

My newest toy was delivered this afternoon by UPS. It happens to be a digital camcorder that my mother ordered for me as an early birthday gift. (My birthday being July 24th) She allowed me to begin using it when I got it. Actually its arrival today was a bit of a shock being that she ordered it on the 5th from HSN.com. We werent expecting it for a few more days.

So which digital camcorder did my mother order for me? The latest special offer from HSN.com which is for the DXG model # DXG-5C8V-HD. It records 1080 HD video in a device that is as thick as a dime is wide, and small enough to fit inside a shirt pocket easily. A nice little digital camcorder to add to my photography tools.

BUT, this afternoon's efforts at setting up the camcorder and trying to get the provided editing software to install left with some frustration. After I got the camcorder battery charged up and the device itself operational learning to record my first video clip was fast & easy. The ArcSoft Total Media HDCam 2.0 software on the other hand has so far proved worthless since I still am unable to get the software to install on my Toshiba laptop which is less than 2 years old.

Every time I tried to install the software I kept getting an error msg that no device was connected, and that was with the device connected to my laptop via USB port. In fact I connected the camcorder to my laptop via every USB port it had. And rebooted the laptop with the camcorder attached and still got the same error msg each time I tried installing the software.

After several attempts at trying to install the software I finally broke down and went to the company website and registered my camcorder. During the registration process I had to identify my model # and found that my model wasnt even listed among the product models. I guess its that new.

After the registration was done, I sent a support email. Within a short while I did recieve an email response. That allowed me to successfully get the device drivers installed on my laptop. But not the editing software. During the process of getting the device drivers installed, I wound up downloading a Canon codec file which allowed me to view the video test clips I create through Windows Media Player. So that got me a level of basic success with my new camcorder. I can now create new videos and view them.

But I still need to have some editing software, and so far the provided software that came with this camcorder just aint working for me yet. I hope to see if I get more info from the company DXG on that problem. And I will continue to keep you all alerted to my experience with using this model camcorder.