Caution - Buying goods straight from China

[heart-of-wessex]

Hello all,

I'm sure you've all heard of the rip off products from China, plenty of iPhone, iPad, PlayStation, Samsung etc products that have been ripped and are also very poor quality too. YouTuber 'Ashens' covers these pretty well!

Anyway a month ago I was in search of a camcorder. Nothing fancy as that would be pricey. I did find a Sony camcorder that records of mini DVD's, which I still have discs for that I used in my old camcorder I've lost. I forgot to check back on it and the bid went and the sale ended, oh well, I'll find another one.

Sure enough I did, a HD Camcorder that records off of SD memory, looks quite fancy, you should still be able to view it here http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/200965585220?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649

£35, not bad but I wasn't expecting too much but expecting it to be reasonable at the same time. It would be more of a stop gap before I can get a proper one. I didn't doubt the £35 too much as, after all, it was unbranded, so your not paying for 'the name' either (like Canon, Sony, Samsung etc). I did a quick search on Google for camcorder rip offs China, dodgy camcorder from China etc, but none of the results said that you should avoid it, don't buy cameras from here and all that. Maybe this was legit?

Well, it took a month to get here. Having been shipped for free and passed through Customs, it arrived with a dent in the box. Dunno what happened, maybe the ship rocked about too much!

Anyway all the bits were in the box, AV cable, USB lead, camera case, manual, swanky looking camcorder and one battery. Usually if it's a rip off or a trashy one, two are supplied as they don't last long.

I tried reading the English part of the manual....yes, tried. It was more of a case of trying to translate it from attempted English to English. Not looking promising...

After charging the battery, I turned it on. Some annoying loud intro jingle is played, doesn't seem to be a sound button to mute button to shut it up, and the press of each button makes a loud beep too.

Quality is looking horrendous through the viewer, and that's in HD mode. Maybe the viewer doesn't have the quality? Time to put an empty SD card I already have which has sat in my draw for donkeys years.

I did a record test in HD and spoke to test the sound too. After recording, I popped the SD card into my PC SD card reader. I played the video and...well...HD my bum!
VERY poor picture, zoom is useless although it works, just the slightest bit of zoom makes it even worst. You can't even read text properly when zoomed in.
The sound is choppy and cuts in and out every 1-2 seconds.

The zoom also stutters, and the anti-shake facility is pointless as it just makes it twice as bad!


Fell into the trap of buying a very **** product from China, just as well it was only £35, something I don't mind loosing to learn from my mistake over, say, £50+

I've since been back on Ebay to buy a second hand SD camcorder, from someone that is in the UK, cost me £57 and is an actual Sony product. It should work well as I've seen the test video's on YouTube.


If you see any unbranded products boasting a lot of features, costs next to nothing and is direct from China, just avoid it! I've learnt from my mistake not to do it again!



James.

 

[trentside]

I can relate to this experience, heart-of-wessex.

My Grandad once decided to buy a cheap 'iPad' off some website or another. The thing was a bit of plastic, with a nasty resistive touch screen that was supposedly HD - but reminded me more of the screen on an early camera phone. The thing didn't even have any form of English manual at all, and despite his best efforts, he couldn't get a decent translation. In the end he chucked the thing in the bin and bought a slightly better Windows tablet (similar to the WPad reviewed by ashens) - this actually worked quite well, apart from another dodgy touch screen, but with a case with a built in keyboard and a USB mouse it was actually a useful bit of kit. It does seem to be something of a lottery as to the quality!

 

[flymo]

Re the Camcorder. In cases like this, when they spell simple words like Video wrong, "Vedio" in this case it is probably a good idea to avoid them. I live in Hong Kong so can appreciate your frustrations, it is sometimes difficult to get things over the counter too...

Anyway sorry to hear about your experience, but hey . at least the vedio works, just the video doesn't. (sorry .... )

 

[Yew]

The only cheap camera I've bought was Maginon splash 80. Its waterproof, and takes accpetable pictures and filming (DONT zoom however, its awful)

Probably be a bit annoyed if it cost more than the £30 i paid for it however

 

[asylumxl]

Does it actually have optical zoom? It sounds like it only has digital zoom since the quality is getting even worse.

 

[jon0844]

I'd say digital zoom, which is basically useless. All that does is use less and less pixels and scale it up, hence the ridiculous results.

Some new mobiles with 20 or 40MP cameras can offer a lossless zoom, as there are so many pixels available that you can zoom in and still create a 5 or 8MP image. The Nokia Lumia 1020 and Sony Xperia Z1 are two such examples. The former also offers a lossless digital zoom for HD video, but I am not sure the Z1 does for reasons unknown.

 

[heart-of-wessex]

Does it actually have optical zoom? It sounds like it only has digital zoom since the quality is getting even worse.

16x Digital zoom only, explains why then...

My Samsung Galaxy records sounds and quality better than this heap! Only dowside to the phone is it drains the battery no-end and slews anything that moves.

Other spec gibberish on the camcoder:

12MP resolution - I've seen an 8MP camcorder with a better output!
Voice recording - If you want bits of sound chopped off...
Up to 16M Image Resolution - The camera facility is more like 16kb..
Support upto 16GB card - Doesn't say if SDHC is compatible, and it took a lot of faff to get the SD card working on it!
Anti-Shake - more like double-shake..

Only useful upgrade from camcorders I've had before is the LED night light assistance!

 

[jon0844]

12MP - is that with 'interpolation' by any chance?

In other words, it tries to scale up by guessing the missing pixel data. About as good as an upscaling DVD player that claims to produce Blu-ray quality video.

 

[Harlesden]

Unless you are okay with paying money for goods that have been manufactured totally free - by prison slave labour - then I suggest you think twice about buying anything made in China. This has been all over the Internet for more than a year now.
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/slaverya21stcenturyevil/2011/10/2011101091153782814.html
(There is a non-YouTube video in the link but I have no idea how to put it in this post)
Once an isolationist communist state, over the last 20 years China has become the world's biggest exporter of consumer goods. But behind this apparent success story is a dark secret - millions of men and women locked up in prisons and forced into intensive manual labour.

"We were not paid at all, we were forced. If anyone refused to work, they would be beaten, some people were beaten to death."

Charles Lee, former prison inmate

China has the biggest penal colony in the world - a top secret network of more than 1,000 slave labour prisons and camps known collectively as "The Laogai". And the use of the inmates of these prisons - in what some experts call "state sponsored slavery" - has been credited with contributing to the country's economic boom.

 

[jon0844]

I doubt there are enough prisoners to keep up with demand, so I'd have to assume that most products aren't made by prisoners who aren't paid.

Sure, I fully believe it happens, but that's not a good enough reason never to buy anything from China.

 

[LexyBoy]

For £35 I'd be surprised if it worked at all! I don't have one, but if I was looking for one I'd be looking at prices at least ten times that. If you don't need good quality then a decent camera or even smartphone can do it.

As for "megapixels", the specification is essentially meaningless in terms of picture quality. It's the optics that count (and what you pay for - the sensors are cheap now). A DSLR from a couple of years ago will likely have fewer pixels than a new phone camera, but will make far superior photos. Back in the day, I had one of these badboys with a whopping 0.3 megapixels (though the term wasn't used then). It took much better pictures than a 2 MP cameraphone I later aquired, simply because it had a good quality lens.

In other words, it tries to scale up by guessing the missing pixel data. About as good as an upscaling DVD player that claims to produce Blu-ray quality video.

Actually I was very impressed by the "upscaling" on my Blu-ray player when playing DVDs; it does seem a lot sharper than non-HD TV channels. But I suspect it might use a slightly more sophisticated algorithm than a super-cheap unbranded camcorder, which probably just clones the adjacent pixel or at best averages between two.

 

[jon0844]

Upscaling can work well on certain images, but a lot of people seemed to imply it created true HD content.. again, a lot of the rather suspect Chinese/Taiwanese imports being sold on some rather suspect websites, or by people who approached you in car parks.

 

[heart-of-wessex]

£35 was a bit of a grey area. Had it been £20 or something I would really expect something poor. I was more looking for a cheap but reasonable camcorder I thought it might do the trick, considering my last camcorder cost only a bit more at around the £50 mark, and was a DVD cam by Hitatchi, not highest quality but not worst at the same time, viewable, reasonable sound and lasted ages (until I lost it on the Great Yarmouth Drags bash somewhere)

I've used my smartphone since but it doesn't like diesel loco sounds and as I say it slews too. The Sony camcorder has been dispatched and is on the way, which should be a better one!

Shows how much I know about camcorders and how the market works too. I thought these dodgy things avoided Ebay and just went for their own sites just incase their reputation got battered on Ebay with negative feedback.

I haven't left any, I'm half tempted to leave negative feedback on the items description unless there is such thing as a very low quality HD level...

 

[yorkie]

For £35 I am not at all surprised. How do you think they can make them so cheap?

As for eBay - yes it is used by dodgy characters and they can just make new accounts!

And only "half tempted" to give negative feedback?!

 

[455driver]

Whats a COMS sensor?
I have heard of a CMOS sensor as used in decent quality cameras, but a COMS sensor!

There are enough 'errors' in the listing to ensure I wouldnt touch it with a barge pole.

 

[richw]

I once bought a camcorder for £25 on eBay about 7-8 years ago. I was young and didn't know the perils of Chinese cheap products. it made what you describe sound high tech. I now have a jvc camcorder which is great.