The DVD-camcorder advantages of the 550A are clear. You can see thumbnails of each scene you've shot, and, when using a rewriteable DVD-RAM disc, delete individual scenes to free up space. You can re-take a shot if the first attempt goes awry, without first having to carefully rewind and worry about the exact spot the tape starts and stops.

Because it writes to the DVD-R format, which when burned properly will play in almost all DVD players, you can share footage instantly without plugs or compatibility issues. Think of it as a Polaroid camera: you shoot, finalize the disc and pop it out. While you can never use a finalized DVD-R disc again, you can retrieve the footage by downloading it to your computer.

Now for the problems. Other camcorders — primarily MiniDV models — record in a format known as DV. You connect the camcorder to your PC or home-theater DVD recorder via a FireWire (aka 1394 or iLINK) cable, and in streams the video. You use software to edit it before turning it into the compressed MPEG format for DVD burning. Because this camcorder writes to DVD, it must save video in the compressed format, which experts say is a lower picture quality. No argument here. Furthermore, the video files aren't immediately accessible — you must extract them using the included DVD-MovieAlbum, a clunky program with unintuitive menu options. My recommendation is to quickly export the files to your computer's hard drive so that you can work on them with the included Sonic MyDVD software, a much easier program.

As I mentioned, picture quality, especially in low lighting, isn't good — I even saw visible "noise" lurking in the shadows of brightly lit scenes. Also the DVD-MovieAlbum software interfered with Roxio's Media Creator 7, forcing me to uninstall the latter in order to extract video from a DVD-RAM disc; not what I'd call a good trade-off. The camcorder's 640x480 pixel still camera was easy to use and writes conveniently to DVD or SD card. If you're interested in this option, spend $100 more, and buy the 580A with its 1.1-megapixel still cam.

Will DVD camcorders ever really take off? Absolutely. Even now, the convenience factor could outweigh the sacrifices of picture quality and video editing. When imaging improves and the software gets sorted out, they ought to be the ideal choice.