2008 Holiday ANTI-Shopping Guide: 15 Products to AVOID!
Top 4
4. Camcorders that use tapes
Everyone wants to capture their memories. Video camcorders are very popular among new families for this very reason, and now camcorders are cheaper and more accessible. Several years ago these recorders required digital tapes (in various formats), but now storage technology has progressed to the point where you can capture DVD-quality video direct to a flash card or internal hard drive.
Video must be highly compressed in real time in order to fit on these new storage media. This means that the video passes through a digital encoder chip, and the video is written in standard MPEG-2, MPEG-4, or other video format. Because they are pre-compressed, the video will never be as sharp or crisp as digital tapes (which were still compressed, but not using MPEG technology).
| Handycam HDR-XR160 160GB Hard Drive HD Camcorder (3″ LCD – Touchscreen – CMOS – 16:9 – 3.3 Megapixel Image – 1.5 Megapixel Video – AVCHD, MPEG-2 – 30x Optical Zoom – Optical IS – Full HD, SD – 160 GB Hard Drive – Speaker, Microphone, Flashlight – HDMI) | |||
 |
Shop at | Price | Seller Rating |
 |
$598.00 |  30800 Reviews |
|
 |
$598.00 |  10642 Reviews |
|
 |
$589.00 | 10851 Reviews |
|
| Compare Prices for All 9 Sellers ($574.00 – $599.99) | |||
 |
Most families would dump their tapes directly to DVD and then re-use their tapes. Unless you’re a video broadcaster then there’s little reason to do otherwise. It just makes sense for the average consumer to write directly to MPEG-2 and then dump directly to DVD without conversion (as many hard-drive-based camcorders do).
Camcorders that write to SD cards usually write in MPEG-4 or a different codec. This is great if you have a media center or network-attached media device, but if you plan on transferring the video to DVD then you’ll still have to go through a conversion and authoring process.
There are some camcorders that write directly to min-DVDs, but this is a toss-up. You can only record about 30 minutes of standard-definition video on a disc, which requires carrying a stack of discs with you. If you want the ease of direct-to-DVD, then consider a model with an internal hard drive.
Either way, these new camcorders are much better (for the consumer) than tape-based camcorders.
3. Any computer sold on a shopping channel
| MacBook MB403LL/A Notebook (2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR2, 160GB HDD, Intel GMA X3100, DVD±RW, Mac OS X Leopard, 13.3” LCD) | |||
 |
Shop at | Price | Seller Rating |
 |
$599.99 | 89 Reviews |
|
| Compare Prices for All 1 Sellers ($599.99 – $699.99) | |||
|
|
This should be as obvious as “don’t buy fish off a truck”… but still year after year QVC and other shopping channels make a killing by selling computers over the airwaves.
For the person who just wants to get online, use Office, and print some photos this computer will probably do just fine. For the geek (or teenager who doesn’t have his own computer): they are usually pretty lame. It is possible that there may be one good deal out of a hundred, but overall I wouldn’t recommend purchasing a computer like this.
The main reason for this is that most of the computers are just not upgradable. They usually have a motherboard with very few options, an integrated video card that can’t play games very well, and barely passable onboard sound. The included memory may not be enough to run the operating system they’re selling. I actually saw a computer being sold that included Windows Vista and 512MB of RAM!
Again, let me reiterate… you can buy a decent cheap computer just about anywhere (even on QVC), but remember who it’s for. Will your grandson who plays video games appreciate a computer that won’t let him play video games? No. Most computers sold on TV are not gamer-friendly. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. Move along.
| MacBook MB403LL/A Notebook (2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR2, 160GB HDD, Intel GMA X3100, DVD±RW, Mac OS X Leopard, 13.3” LCD) | |||
|
|
Shop at | Price | Seller Rating |
|
|
$599.99 | 89 Reviews |
|
| Compare Prices for All 1 Sellers ($599.99 – $699.99) | |||
|
|
2. Any Guitar Hero/Rock Band Knock-Offs
It seems like whenever any thing becomes a hit, then vendors flood the market with crap hoping to cash in on the confusion they’ve created. For example, every time a Disney movie comes out then some low-budget Chinese animation house comes out with a similarly-named direct-to-DVD piece of crap. The same is true with Guitar Hero
I’ve seen some toys that only have segments of songs that have you push fret buttons, and these are incredibly lame and cheap. If the thing you’re looking at doesn’t work with one of the three major consoles (Xbox 360, PS3, or Wii) then you should put it down.
Extra peripherals are ok. Nyko and a few other vendors make some great guitar controllers, and these are the few exceptions to this rule. Avoid Konami’s Rock Revolution like the plague… it’s not Guitar Hero, even though they try to make you think that.
| PlayStation 3 Slim Black 160GB Console (PS3 – IBM Cell Processor 3.2GHz – 256MB XDR DRAM RAM – DVD-Reader DVD-ROM – Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth – Game Pad) | |||
 |
Shop at | Price | Seller Rating |
 |
$299.99 | 24845 Reviews |
|
| Compare Prices for All 1 Sellers ($237.00 – $299.99) | |||
|
|
1. HD-DVD players and movies
I was so sure that HD-DVD would win the format war. These format wars usually take several years before one becomes the victor, but the battle for the next-generation DVD was over almost as quickly as the first Iraq War.
You can now find HD-DVD players for bargain-basement prices (and the movies are even cheaper). Do NOT under any circumstances be enticed into thinking that HD-DVD is a good idea. It’s a dead format. Even though there may be some titles that aren’t on BluRay right now, they will come out eventually.
If you’re thinking about a high-definition format for your video junkie, then get a blu-ray player. One of the best BluRay Players is Sony’s Playstation 3. The PS3 costs exactly the same as a good BluRay Player, but it pulls triple duty as a game console, bluray player, and networked audio/video appliance.
If you’re turned off by Bluray’s prices: then this is exactly why you should avoid HD-DVD. HD-DVD is cheap for a reason. Don’t buy into it.
4 Comments
If you've got an XBOX360, it might just not apply. The addon player is $40 and the movies $4 to $12 retail in a store here, and can probably be gotten for less I'd imagine, online, used etc. So for those who would like to add this on to the console, especially those with the versions or newer models with HDMI out, well. (Sadly, mine is an older normal model missing HDMI and it's not worth the money to me to move from the RGB composite video with optical sound.)
Even if you hook a non-HDMI XBOX360 to a large one of those analog TV systems for the kids, you're still getting movies for cheap. Although I suppose there's always Netflix for $9 a month.
Buying HD-DVDs are kinda like buying CDs in today's world. You might want to pick them up if you intend to rip them, but otherwise they are unusable. Honestly, the HD movies I'm interested in aren't on any format… I download them from Usenet (like Star Wars and other movies that aren't on HD yet). I then play these downloaded movies on the Xbox 360 (or PS3 or HTPC).
The reason I felt the HD-DVD thing needed to be said was because I know way too many people that know nothing about home theater that were enticed into these deals before I talked them out of it. Where you or I could find some use out of these drives, the average person will be completely throwing their money away.
I hope someone I know (or you know) read my article and is more informed… cuz I just get way too much crap from people guessing what a nerd might like )