I’m going to be the proud new owner of a (used) Panasonic NV-DS9 digital camcorder in a couple of days… However, it’s a model which was only released in Japan, so everything is in Japanese… (obviously!)
Since my Japanese is limited to about two words, and figuring out menu choices would probably be WAY above my ability… There is virtually nothing online in English about this camcorder… Panasonic US has nothing online about it, and Panasonic Japan’s site is totally incomprehensible to me…
I should have no problem with the basics - the buttons are pretty much the same wherever you live, and since it has firewire, I can hook it up to my computer to do DV editing…
It might get frustrating staring at a 4 inch LCD screen if I can’t even figure out how to turn it on!
I really just need it to grab some video to work on my editing skills, so even if I don’t figure out the fun stuff it’ll be fine… But it would be cool to figure out how to really play with it…
Any ideas on what to do? Maybe I’ll have to drag it to Japantown here in SF and beg people on the street to figure out the menus for me!
Are there any local language schools nearby? If they could use the Camcorder as a practical lesson they’d probably do it for free for you. Just an idea.
Panasonic Japan’s site is totally incomprehensible to me…
SFC,
You might try this. If you use IE 5 and above as your browser
add the Google toolbar to it. It’s a freebie and can be gotten at: http://toolbar.google.com/ One of the options is “page info” under which is “translate into English”. I’ve used it a few times on some foreign language sites, basically just to see if it works.
Does a pretty decent job of translating BUT I’m afraid I don’t know if it will handle Japanese. If you don’t want to go to the trouble of adding the Google toolbar just to see if it works send the URL for the Japanese site and I’ll check and get back to you.
BTW, this Google toolbar is a GREAT little program.
I would test it out with your television first. I had a friend get a great deal on a video camera in Singapore, and it turned out that it was the PAL format instead of NTSC used here. I am assuming that US and Canadian use the same format, but I may be wrong. Anyway, after getting home and discovering this, he had to spend several hundred dollars on a PAL->NTSC converter, which completely eliminated (and then some) the “Great Deal” he got.
I checked out the page with altavista, and could only get the basics in English… Not enough to understand much… Google, here I come
I’m getting the camera from someone in the US, so I already know it works here… But NTSC/PAL shouldn’t be an issue, since I only need it to input video into the computer…
I like the language school idea… Maybe I need to sign up for a Japanese course while I’m at it…
