Analysis: Big retailers unite to make DMCA look stupid

Dave Farquhar General ,

A quartet of retailers ganged up on FatWallet.com and made it take down some ads for next week’s big sales, citing the DMCA. The ‘Net is up in arms.
It’s stupid. But not for the reasons you think.

In case you’re wondering, it’s been common practice for years now for someone to get hold of stores’ sales flyers in advance, then go on some forum somewhere (FatWallet.com isn’t the only place they go) and post scans of the flyers, or links to scans of the flyers, so people know what’s going to be on sale where. People make the biggest deal abut the holiday sales flyers, but it’s pretty easy to get the sales flyer from any old Sunday’s paper a few days in advance. If I want to know what’s on sale at Office Depot next Sunday, I can probably know by Thursday without going to too much trouble.

Retailers are starting to crack down on this.

The DMCA is the wrong law to be invoking. We’re talking scans of paper ads here. The stuff wasn’t digital media until someone other than the retailer made it into digital media. The appropriate law to be invoking is plain old copyright law. Let’s not make things more complicated than we need to. Unless we want to make the DMCA look like the stupidity that it is. They can feel free to do that if they want.

The community at large is in an uproar because they’re mad that the ads can’t be distributed in advance and big retailers who can afford lots of lawyers are picking on a Web site, probably operated on a shoestring, that definitely cannot. Yes, the legal system is a bunch of bullies. But that can go two ways also. Big companies can harass individuals or little ones, but if everyone who’s offended by these actions sued all four companies for $250 in small claims court in their home counties, that would be legal harassment as well, because it would cost these companies more than $250 to defend themselves from the nuissance suits. They would win, but the fight isn’t worth fighting.

Besides, when you scan an ad and you put it on the Internet, you are breaking the law. Copyright is just that–the right to decide who can copy something. Or can’t. And the conditions can be stupid and ludicrous. Or reasonable. And they can change over time too.

“But it’s a collection of facts!” people are whining. So is the telephone book. The telephone book is copyrighted. You can print your own telephone book (McCleod does just that, printing up its own alternative to the Southwestern Bell Yellow Pages), but if you copy someone else’s, they can (and will) sue you. There are bogus entries in every telephone book to keep people from doing that. A lot of copyrighted things are nothing more than collections of facts.

Other people are bemused that the store’s ads are being circulated, more widely than otherwise, for free, and the stores are offended that people might show up to buy stuff.

That argument I buy. But it’s not the public showing up that they’re worried about. I’m not sure that it’s the public knowing in advance what’s going to be on sale and for how much that they’re worried about either. Waiting an extra week for a sale before making a purchase is pretty standard practice anyway–it’s just that 20 years ago, you had to guess what might be on sale.

No, it’s that Target and Wal-Mart don’t want each other to know their sale prices. Best Bait-n-Switch doesn’t want Circuit… City to know its sale prices. Staples doesn’t want OfficeMax and Office Depot to know its sale prices. The longer the competition knows the prices in advance, the more time they have to adjust. It happens to be a lot easier for me to get in and out of my local Best Bait-n-Switch, so my natural inclination is to go there. Someone who lives a little north of me will find it a whole lot easier to get in and out of Circuit, so if Circuit has known its rival’s pricing for a week, its prices will all be the same anyway, so they’ll go there. Best Bait-n-Switch wants those people who live to the north to go to the extra trouble of making a left turn on Lindbergh (it’s a pain, as anyone familiar with the area can tell you) to save a few bucks.

So what can FatWallet.com do? I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know for sure. They’re on much stronger legal ground if they don’t present scans of the ads. Just the facts, ma’am. A list of goods and prices in plain old ASCII is probably protected free speech. If it isn’t, adjust the prices. You know how everything sells for $19.95 or $19.99 or something similar, right? Round the prices up. It’s easier to type anyway. Presenting them in the same order as they are on the page might be too close of a copy. Sort the items alphabetically.

It takes more time for someone to sit down and type up a few dozen items and prices. But the person who does it probably stands on good legal ground. After all, the ad itself is copyrighted material. But the facts, as they say, can’t be.

These guys want your spam

Dave Farquhar Spam

In case you haven’t heard, the FTC wants you to forward spam to them at uce@ftc.gov. But they’re not the only ones who want your spam.
So does Spam Archive. Their goal is to accumulate a nice cross-representative sample of spam, for example, to use in seeding Bayesian filters. It’s taken me about a week to accumulate 146 spam messages and with that sample set, now my Bayesian filter works more often than not. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go download an archive of, say, a couple thousand spam messages and seed a Bayesian filter with that?

Some Slashdotters questioned the group’s motives. The admin contact on the site has connections to a commercial anti-spam company. If this is a front for a for-profit company and they benefit from the contributions, I say so what? I’m not one of those “everything should be free” people. I certainly hope they will keep their word and make the spam archive available to all comers. And if they do that, I really couldn’t care less who benefits.

Red Hat and Debian fans debate desktop Linux

Dave Farquhar Linux , , , , , , , ,

Mail from longtime reader Steve Mahaffey on the state of desktop Linux. My responses interspersed within:
SM: It’s been a while since I’ve emailed you, though I still read your site almost daily and comment from time to time.

DF: I appreciate that.

SM: Other than our common faith the most important subject that I could comment on might be desktop Linux.

DF: And it’s been a while since I’ve written about either of those. Too long.

SM: In the past I’ve used Mandrake and Suse briefly, and Red Hat 7.2/3 more extensively. As a server, Red Hat 7.3, booted to runlevel 3, runs until the power goes off at my West Houston home long enough to outlast my UPS. On the other hand, as a desktop OS, Red Hat 7.3 with KDE or Ximian Gnome would crash 1-3 x per week, and Ximian Gnome would get corrupted, requiring me to delete various ./.gnome* config files or files in /tmp to fix it, which most users would not be able to fathom or guess at.

DF: The more advanced desktop environments seem to be pretty sensitive to something or other. I haven’t figured out what exactly. That’s part of the reason why I run IceWM on Debian on my desktop; it’s stable. Running Gnome apps under IceWM on Debian “Unstable” (the experimental, bleeding-edge Debian distro), I’ve been chasing a slow memory leak that eventually consumes all available physical memory and eventually leads to a crash, but it takes a month or two. More on what I think is going on in a minute.

SM: Red Hat 8.0 on my primary workstation, on the other hand, is currently at 43 days uptime. NO CRASHES, once or twice I have restarted the x-server, and once I had a problem with the gnome conifg files. I know that you use Debian mostly, but Red Hat, Lindows, Mandrake, Lycoris, or the like will be the ones to have a mass impact on the desktop. Seems like Lycoris or Lindows was Debian based, though.

DF: I know Lindows is based on Debian. I don’t know Lycoris’ origin. You are correct that Debian will have minimal impact on the desktop, at least in the home. Debian doesn’t give a rip about commercial success and it shows.

I saw Red Hat 8 and Mandrake 9 recently and I was impressed at how far they’ve come. I haven’t touched Red Hat since 6.2 or Mandrake since, well, 7.2 probably. They looked stable and fast. And I saw a minimal (no options picked) Mandrake 9 install the other night. It was 144 megs. I remember not long ago trying to do minimal Red Hat and Mandrake installs and they were 300 megs, at least. That’s definitely a step in the right direction.

SM: Anyway, besides much greater stability, I have enough functionality for most of my needs in programs like Open Office, gnucash, Mozilla or Galeon, Evolution or KMail, etc. Some may have other needs, only met via Windows only programs, of course. I have noticed that RH 8.0 seems on occasion to be slow, but not most of the time. The menus are a little funny … easy to add to the KDE menus, but they don’t always seem to work. With Gnome, it’s easier to add a custom panel to add a non-default application, but it does work then.

DF: Linux currently meets most of the needs I observe on the typical user’s desktop. Not necessarily power users, but for the basic users who are interested in typing simple documents like letters and memos, simple spreadsheets (and let’s face it, an awful lot of spreadsheets use very basic math, if any at all), e-mail, Web browsing, chat, and listening to music, Linux provides solutions that are as good as, if not superior to, those that run on Windows.

I also observe how many users don’t know how to add an application to Windows’ Start menu, or desktop, or that quick-launch thing on the taskbar. It may be easier on Windows, but it’s still not easy enough for most people.

Of course, this is coming from someone who keeps at least one shell window open at all times in Linux and launches apps from there because it’s faster and easier for me to type the first few letters of an app and hit tab and then enter than it is to navigate a menu. For people like me, Linux is much, much superior to Windows and always will be.

SM: RH 8.0 did recognize my nVidia card, but did NOT enable opengl 3d acceleration. I had to install the nVidia drivers from the nVidia web site to get opengl acceleration…apparently Red Hat has decided to not support that at this time. Another oddity is that I have had to turn on the cd sound to play audio CDs by using the kde mixer…can’t seem to do it with the gnome mixer, and don’t know where to hack a config file or file permissions to do this.

DF: Given Red Hat’s history with KDE, it’s ironic that some things work better in KDE than Gnome on Red Hat. Nvidia’s decision to only provide binary drivers (not source) hasn’t proven popular with a lot of Linux distributors, which probably has a lot to do with the OpenGL issues. Red Hat isn’t going to go out of its way to make nVidia look good, and might actually go out of its way to make nVidia not look as good as ATI or Matrox or other companies who are willing to provide straight source, taking the chance that users will blame nVidia rather than Red Hat or Linux. (That’s not a particularly safe bet, but it’s not out of character, given past history.)

SM: Other things… Evolution crashes a lot. I’ve given up and started using KMail (for IMAP since I use my own mail server with IMAP). Galeon is good, but it seems that I had some printing issues and I’ve been using Mozilla more. I’ll have to see how the Phoenix browser comes along…it might be the best choice. Flash and Java required a manual install.

DF: Evolution is stable for me in Debian (more stable than Outlook 2000 under Windows 2000) but I’ve heard that complaint. I have to wonder if Evolution might be picky about the libraries it’s linked to and what it’s compiled with and how? Debian is really conservative; Red Hat is much more apt to use C compilers that haven’t proven themselves just yet. It’s great that GCC 3.2 is so much faster, but if that speed is still coming at the price of stability, let’s back off, eh?

I like Galeon but I don’t print Web pages much. Phoenix is turning into a very nice browser. Lately I’ve been using Mozilla nightly builds for the spam filtering in the mail client and no other reason.

SM: All in all, maybe Red Hat 8.0 is still more a distro that is more suited for corporate environments that have IT personnel around to hand-hold, and which need only modest desktop application abilities. But, it’s coming quite close to the fabled “Aunt Minnie” friendly OS that will really give Microsoft fits.

DF: It’ll take time to get mainstream appeal but I believe it will. Linux PCs in Wal-Mart are a very good thing, because it gives exposure and feedback. The press hasn’t been too kind to the Linux PCs sold there, but if the criticisms are addressed, things will get better, faster, for all distributions. Windows nothing but a really bad Mac wanna-be for 10 years, but it ripened because it infiltrated mass-market PCs. The press applauded Microsoft as it washed its dirty laundry in public. Linux won’t get that same treatment, but I’ll take a criticizing press over a kiss-butt press any day of the week if the goal is product maturity. Windows has been 20 years in the making, but XP still crashes too much.

And as far as Red Hat vs. Debian goes, I may have to give Red Hat another look as a desktop OS soon.

SM: Most of your comments seem to center around Linux and server applications. This is not trivial or unimportant. However, I think that the time for desktop Linux may be getting quite close, and I’d be interested in your comments if you feel so inclined.

DF: My focus has changed in the past year. Two years ago, I did desktop support, and server work in emergencies. About a year ago, I started moving into server support and only did desktop support in emergencies. It’s been a year since I’ve dealt with end users on a regular basis, so I don’t know as much what’s wanted or needed on the desktop anymore and I definitely don’t think about it nearly as much since I’m almost never confronted with it.

I think my thoughts on it are still worth something, since it’s only been a year, but that kind of experience definitely doesn’t age well.

Getting back to the desktop, the apps we need are in place. What they need most now are must-have features that Microsoft won’t supply, or won’t supply quickly. Bayesian spam filtering in Mozilla is a prime example of Open Source beating MS to the punch. A great idea showed up on Slashdot, some early implementations showed up immediately, and within a month or two, it’s in Mozilla’s alpha builds. The public at large will have a usable implementation within a couple of months. And there will be others. I suspect we’ll see lots of examples of it in digital media. I mean, whose design would you rather use, the design of someone concerned only with corporate interests, or the design of a group of users concerned with their fair-use rights and yours and mine?

SM: Anyway, maybe you’ll find my observations to be of interest.

DF: Always.

Pretty Boy rides again (unfortunately)

Dave Farquhar Personal

I was at the grocery store on Sunday with my girlfriend, Amanda, stocking up on whatever was on sale. Since I’ve got a pantry now, I’m gonna use it. As we went through the store, we passed a petite girl, around 5’4″, with sandy blonde hair.
Then her boyfriend and her (maybe their) daughter appeared. He was about six feet, with short, cropped dark hair. It was longer on top and it was teased out at the edges. It was styled more than most guys bother with, and he didn’t look all that happy to be there or all that happy to be with her. He had lots of words written all over him: Cocky. Pretty Boy. Arrogant. Jerk.

She and I made eye contact, briefly. There was an intense sense of curiosity and at least a hint of longing in her eyes, as if she was wondering if I was like her guy. If all guys are like her guy.

I didn’t think much of it until we went to the checkout line. The trio came around just after we did. She went into the checkout lane next to the one we were in. Pretty Boy got into the checkout lane behind us. After I paid, I walked down to the end to start bagging, and Amanda stayed behind in the lane, feeding the remaining groceries down the conveyer belt to me. As she fed the last couple of items down to me, Pretty Boy rammed his cart into her back. “Excuse me,” he said, very loudly and impatiently. She scurried out of his way.

I bagged the last couple of items as Amanda walked around beside me. I swung the cart around towards the exit, pushed it a few inches, then turned around to Pretty Boy. “Next time, why don’t you say ‘Excuse me,’ before you mow her down with the cart?” I asked.

“Oh, shut up,” Pretty Boy said angrily.

Ah, so I’d come upon the center of the universe and I was in the wrong for not acknowledging that. In his mind. (The rest of us don’t live in that world, fortunately.)

I looked Pretty Boy straight in the eye. “Thanks for being a [one-syllable word that begins with “p” and rhymes with “kick”],” I said.

The cashier looked our direction. Pretty Boy looked around, then looked abck at me and mouthed a three-letter word that starts with “F” that’s derogatory to homosexual males.

Noting that he wasn’t worth any more expenditure of oxygen, I turned around and walked away.

Why Pretty Boy chose to question my sexuality with my girlfriend (who holds her own in the looks department too) standing right there, I’m not sure. I asked her about that after we got in the car. The best I could think of was that maybe he didn’t know what the word means. After all, “homosexual” is a complex idea and the word is three syllables more than the longest word he uttered in our presence, and the longest sentence he uttered was all of three words, including “Oh,” which is a common filler word thrown in to sentences to buy time as your brain searches for the right words to say. So Pretty Boy didn’t exactly bowl me over with his speaking ability or intelligence.

I also noted that my one friend who does happen to be homosexual is 6’2″ and wouldn’t have had any trouble whatsoever knocking Pretty Boy down on his cocky, arrogant butt and mopping the floor with it. And he probably wouldn’t have hesitated to do it either.

That’s overreacting. Calling attention to his behavior and letting his true colors shine through for all around to see ought to be pennance enough for what he did. She said he didn’t hurt her.

But if Pretty Boy’s behavior is indicative of how he treats women, I can’t help but think that if someone does overreact next time and sprawls Pretty Boy across the floor, the world will be a better place for it.

At least for the moment before he stands back up.

I have seen the future, and it works!

Dave Farquhar Spam ,

Now appearing nightly, in the nightly Mozilla builds, the Open Source community is very proud to present a very special feature: Naive Bayesian spam filtering!
And you’re probably wondering why I’m excited about something as boring-sounding as that. Don’t worry. I’m no less sane than I was yesterday and I’ll prove it.

Bayes’ Rule is a method of pattern recognition. You tell it what is spam and what isn’t and over time it learns how to recognize what is and isn’t spam. Click here for an explanation of what it is and why it works.

Its main selling point is that when implemented properly and trained thoroughly, Bayesian filtering is very effective at identifying spam and produces nearly zero false positives.

So I excitedly downloaded and ran the Nov. 14 Mozilla nightly build. The filtering doesn’t presently filter, it only marks the messages as spam and non-spam. That’s OK, I can sort them and then zap them myself for a while. I trained it on about 1,400 non-spam messages (I only had a few dozen spams). It doesn’t identify much spam yet, but I’ve had zero false positives. It recognizes my most incessant spammer, the Smartmall Success Group (Kevin Butthead, take your Amway-meets-ecommerce scheme and stick it. I’m much more interested in joining the mafia.) and it’s starting to recognize unsolicited credit card spam.

Spam normally irritates me. Really irritates me. But now it’s a game. I look forward to spam coming in to see if Mozilla recognizes it. And it’s encouraging to watch it learn and get better. I’m going to win this battle. Within a month, I expect that time I waste deleting spam and making sure I didn’t delete anything important will be free for me to do something else with it. Like answer legitimate mail from people I’ve never heard of.

Some people argue this filtering belongs on the server, but not everyone is willing to filter spam on the server. My employer never will (because many of my employer’s departments engage in questionable e-mail practices themselves) and I’d be shocked if my ISP ever did. I can set up my own mail server, but this is a lot easier. It’s probably a lot easier for you too, even if you’re one of the half-dozen or so experienced Unix sysadmins who regularly read these pages.

If you’re like me and you have 1,000+ e-mail messages squirreled away somewhere, and you don’t mind playing with alpha-level code (which you don’t if you’re running Windows, since Microsoft is in the habit of shipping alpha code and charging you hundreds of dollars for the privelige of alpha- and beta-testing it for them), go get this thing. Start training it. And watch the spam go bye-bye.

And if you’re better than me about cleaning out your inbox, get it anyway. It’ll just take you longer to train it.

Basic design principles

Dave Farquhar Design

Steve DeLassus asked me for some tips on design for a site he’s building. Since that’s fairly general-interest information, I figure I might as well make a post of it.
The most important thing to remember is that there are basic rules of design that you can follow and be a good designer, even if you have zero ability. Great designers know where to break the rules. (And for the record, if I were a great designer, I’d be an art director for some magazine somewhere. I’m not.)

Fonts. General rule: Serif fonts are easier to read on paper than sans-serif fonts. The opposite is usually true onscreen, which has lower resolution than paper. You can play it safe by specifying fonts like Verdana, Lucida, and Georgia, which are specially designed for screen displays.

Use Lucida or Verdana if you want to look modern. Use Georgia if you want to look traditional.

Specify Times as a secondary font for Georgia, and Helvetica and Arial as secondaries for Lucida or Verdana, but those fonts are so common that I’d avoid them for primary use. As an experiment in college, I stopped using Times and Arial on my papers and susbstituted other, less-common fonts. My grades improved. Being a little bit distinctive can help. I suspect Georgia and Verdana may one day become as common online as Times and Arial, but that day isn’t here yet.

Colors. Use a high-contrast scheme like black on white. People are used to light backgrounds and dark text, so be prepared for complaints if you use a dark background and light text, even if you believe (as I do) that dark backgrounds are easier on the eyes. People in their teens and 20s (and possibly early 30s) are likely to be more forgiving on this than people who are older.

I’ve run into people who are militantly opposed to dark backgrounds. I’ve never run into anyone militantly opposed to light ones. So play it safe.

Color schemes. Follow the rules of the color wheel unless you know better. And remember: Any color will look fine with black or white, and very nearly any color will look fine with some shade of gray. Limit funky color schemes to your navigation bar; keep your main body text close to the classic black and white.

Keep in mind what you want to convey. A funky, hip site might mix orange and blue or orange and green. A more conservative site will drift towards blue and yellow.

And a very safe choice: Black, white, and red. Anything you do with those three colors will look just fine.

An easy way to play with color schemes is to visit this site.

Backgrounds. The in thing seven years ago in Web design was to use a background pattern. Today that’s generally a no-no, at least if you’re overlaying text. Place your text against a solid color. Limit background usage to your margins. Busy backgrounds are distracting.

Animation. I have animation turned off in all of my Web browsers. Animation is distracting. You can look very professional if you never use animated GIFs, Flash, or Javascript. It is extraordinarily difficult to use animated GIFs, Flash, and gratuitous Javascript and not look amateurish.

Think about it for a minute: Our most basic instinct is survival. And out in the wild, movement could mean a couple of things. Something that moved might be lunch. Or something that moved might think you’re lunch. So you naturally pay more attention to something that moves than to something that doesn’t.

On most professionally designed sites, the only thing that moves is the ads. There’s a big reason for that.

Existing media. If you have art you intend to use, make sure your site goes with it. Better yet, design your site around it. I designed this site around the montage of photos along the top. Steve had a family crest. It’s an elegant, attractive design. Almost as attractive and elegant as my family crest. Steve’s crest utilized a blue and a gray that seem to go really well together, so I suggested Steve use those colors as the principal colors in his site. The gray will be well-suited for the background of the text portion, so the natural place to use the blue is in his navigation bar.

Rule breakage. The exception to virtually every rule here is your page title. When you blow text up really big, you can get away with almost anything. So if you’re going to get daring, get daring on your page title. And even if you don’t get daring, most fonts look terrific really big. So blow your page title up really big.

Back in business

Dave Farquhar General

Some people have had problems accessing this site the past couple of weeks. I think we finally hunted down an answer (Thanks to Dan Bowman especially for his detective work). I ended up having to drop the MTU on my Web server down a little bit. That’s easy enough to do–become root, then issue ifconfig eth0 mtu 1200 and you’re golden, at least until the next power failure.
PPPoE adds overhead to transfers that can prevent people under some circumstances from being able to get to a Web site hosted in such an environment. Dropping the MTU a bit gives PPPoE some breathing room.

Picking out a camcorder

Dave Farquhar Video , , , , , , , , , ,

I had someone ask me for some advice in picking out a camcorder yesterday. I know I’ve talked a little bit about that before, but this field is always changing, so it doesn’t hurt to revisit it.
I’m going to link to a bunch of stuff on Amazon here. Amazon’s not the only place to buy this stuff, of course, but their selection is good, and I have an affiliation with them. If someone clicks on one of these links and ends up buying something, I get a kickback. But my primary motivation is informational.

Second things second: I know they’re cheap, but think twice about analog camcorders. A Quasar VHS-C camcorder will run you $200. You get a nice 20X optical zoom and a few digital effects, and it’s nice to be able to play your tapes in your VCR, but those are the only benefits you get. The image resolution is a lot lower than with a digital camcorder, and it’s a lot less convenient to dump video from an analog camcorder into a computer for editing. Since any computer you buy new today will have at least some editing capability (current versions of Mac OS and Windows include at least rudimentary video editors, so all you’d need to add to a PC is a $25 Firewire card if it doesn’t have built-in Firewire), you’ll probably want to be able to take advantage of it. If you don’t have Windows XP or ME, you can pick up a $65 Pinnacle Studio DV, which will give you the Firewire ports, rudimentary editing software, and most importantly, slick capture and titling software. The capture software is especially nice; it’ll detect scene changes for you and catalog them. Even if you do have editing software, you might want this. It saves me a lot of time.

Digital8 cameras are getting hard to find. Their chief selling point, besides price, was the ability to use analog Hi8 tapes, which was nice if you were upgrading. If you have some Hi8 tapes and want to continue to use them and want an easy way to move them to a computer for editing, look for a Digital8 camera. But there’s a good possibility you’ll have to buy online. And the resolution isn’t as high as MiniDV–Digital8’s selling points in the past were price and backward compatibility. The price advantage is evaporating, leaving just backward compatibility as a selling point. MiniDV is the future.

Panasonic has a digital 4-in-1 device that does video, still, voice, and MP3 duties. I don’t recommend it. The image quality is substandard, its fixed focus will make it even worse, and you can’t mount it on a tripod. Its list price is $450 and I saw it at Amazon for $340, but it’s a toy. Given a choice between it and a $250 analog camcorder, I’d go analog every time.

MiniDV is pretty clearly the way to go. It’s the emerging standard, as it’s become inexpensive, the tapes are compact and reliable, and the resolution and picture quality is fantastic.

You can spend as much as you want. An entry-level MiniDV camera, such as the JVC GRDVL120U, will run you about $400. For $400, you get 16X optical zoom, S-Video output for TV playback and a Firewire connection to dump your video to computer for editing, image stabilization, the choice between manual and autofocus, and the ability to take still shots and dump them to tape.

Pay no attention whatsoever to digital zoom. Using digital zoom to get much more than double your maximum optical zoom is completely worthless. There’s enough fudge factor in NTSC television that you can get away with using a little bit of digital zoom, but with this camera, once you’ve zoomed in to 32X, you’ve cut your effective resolution from that of DVD to that of VHS tape. Zoom in much more than that, and your image will look very pixelated. This particular JVC advertises 700X digital zoom, but you definitely don’t want to use it.

You can spend three times as much on a Sony DCRPC120BT. For your money you’ll get a better lens, so your image quality will be a little bit better. Whether that makes a difference will depend mostly on the television you’re displaying on. You’ll get much higher-resolution still shots, and the ability to store your stills on a memory stick. That’s a very nice feature–no need to advance and rewind your tape to find shots, and no need to interrupt your video sequences with stills. You actually get less optical zoom. You get less digital zoom too, but that’s not important. You’ll also get a microphone jack, which is very important. The microphone built into the camera will pick up some motor noise and won’t necessarily pick up what’s happening across the room. It’s very nice to have the ability to wire up a microphone to get away from the camera motor and possibly get closer to the sound source, to keep the sound from being muffled. You probably won’t buy an external mic right away. But chances are it’s something you’ll eventually want.

Personally, when I’m on a project, I’d much rather have the inexpensive JVC (or something less expensive that offers a microphone input) because the $800 more I would spend to get the Sony would let me buy a digital still camera with much better capabilities than the Sony offers. And when I’m shooting a video, having two cameras is an advantage–I can set them both up on tripods and shoot, or hand one camera off to someone else and tell them to get me some shots. Having two cameras can get me a whole lot better picture of what’s going on. But not everybody’s shooting documentaries like me. For travel, the Sony is a whole lot more convenient and more than worth the extra money. And if you’re recording your child’s birthday party, you probably just want one camera in order to avoid turning your living room into a TV studio.

So you need to figure out what you plan to do with it.

As far as accessories go, you absolutely want a tripod. Again, you can spend as much as you want. Amazon offers a Vivitar kit for about $40 that includes a bag and a tripod. With image stabilization, you can run around shooting birthday parties and vacation scenes and have a reasonably good-looking image that won’t give you the shakes. But if you’re recording Christmas morning, then set the camcorder up across the room, then go over and open presents with your family. I know, I hate being on camera, and you might too. But I wish I had some home video footage of my Dad. I remember his laugh and I remember how he loved to joke around, but I can’t show that to anyone.

If you just want to set the camcorder up at a fixed angle and run across the room, a cheap tripod will do the job nicely. If you’re going to be standing behind the camera and panning the scene, buck up for a fluid-head tripod. You’ll be able to move the camera much more smoothly. My Bogen tripod wasn’t cheap, but I wouldn’t be without it now that I have it. I think some people with arthritis have steadier hands than I do, but even I can do good-looking pans and zooms with that tripod.

Sometimes people ask me about brands. I learned on JVC equipment, so I’m partial to it. But it’s hard to go wrong with any of what I call the Big Four: JVC, Panasonic,
Sony, or Canon. Professionals use all four brands with excellent results. Sure, every professional has a preference. But the differences among the Big Four will be pretty slight. I’m less comfortable with offerings from companies like Sharp and Samsung. They haven’t been in the business as long, and they’re consumer electronics companies. The other companies sell to professionals. Some of that expertise will inevitably filter down into their consumer products as well. And the difference in price and features between a Sharp or a Samsung and a JVC, Panasonic, Canon or Sony isn’t very much, so a top-tier offering is a better bet for the money.