The 40,000 Mile Long Term Test Drive

Author's Rating:

Pros: 3.0" LCD, Color ViewFinder, nice extras.

Cons: No inputs.

The Bottom Line: 
This was a great camera in the 8mm days but with the digital guys and Hi8mm around you may want to look less where.

Author's Review
My parents bought this camcorder for the family 4 years ago. I've personally taken it to Hawaii, Las Vegas, Reno, etc. Filmed countless of amatuer videos for weddings, birthdays, funerals and the birth of my first child. The Sharp VL-SE10 first stands out from it's Sharp siblings because it is a Slim Cam rather than the more popular View cam design. This one actually looks like a Camcorder. :)

The picture quality is excellent considering that it is an 8mm. Indoor shooting is great and that's without a camera light which incidentally sharp doesn't offer. It allows you to take still pictures on 8mm, not great quality but decent to say the least. There is a built-in titler, which has some canned titles and also gives you the opportunity to create your own titles for your production. Analog Special Effects like Sepia, Black and White, etc are available. But what really stands out is that (for it's time and considering some of today's offerings) the VL-SE10U offers a huge 3.0" LCD and a colorview finder to film your events. One nice thing to mention is the 64X Digital zoom was good enough to zoom from the window of my hotel room to about a distance of half a mile to the beach in Hawaii to film two humpback whales breaching. The camera also features an automatic macro lens mode that will turn on if you are filming something real close to the camera.

Sound Quality is great but it is only monoaural albeit Hifi. The microphone is decent as Camcorders go, but distant objects would give you a hard time to pickup and a major complaint is that Sharp doesn't give you the option to use an external microphone. Thinking about using headphones to monitor your sound? Forget it, no headphone jack is present here.

To output your footage to a TV or VCR you may use the included A/V cable which features a 3.5mm male jack on one end and a Yellow (Video) and a White (Audio) RCA plug on the other end.

The batteries are in NIMH Mickel-Metal Hydride format which is sometimes a pain because with the LCD panel open and the digital image stabilization activated the battery drains very fast. I had two BT22U, the smaller 1800mAH batteries it came with and I was not able to film an hour between the two of them. What also sucks about these batteries is the fact that you can either charge them or use the AC adaptor. You can not charge the batteries while using AC power, unlike the Sonys.

The controls are great, they feel very positive. The drive controls are located on top and the record and standby buttons are within reach of your index finger. Power zoom from wide angle to telephoto is a easy is left for your thumb to accomplish. There is even an included remote control.

Playback is effortless, simply switch the camcorder to VCR and hit play on the remote or the camera and now you are playing back. The built in speaker is loud and reproduces sounds fairly accurate. The power zoom also doubles as the Volume control.

Overall the VL-SE10U is an excellent purchase, when we bought it 4 years ago I remember paying something in the neighborhood of $1200 for the camera, an extra battery, a tripod, a case and a pack of Sony 8mm tapes.

This camera has weathered through the years every well and it works jsut as good as it did 4 years ago. Definitely a great buy.