Great Video, Memory Stick, Photos NEED flash

Author's Rating:

Pros: Memory Stick, Picture Quality

Cons: Need flash for dark room

Author's Review
We bought this prior to the birth of our son. I looked at several different digital video cameras and came to the conclusion that this one would be most useful for us.

Pros:
1) Takes excellent quality video, you can see the difference clearly between Digital Video and VHS.

2) Very small, making it portable and easy to carry around, you don't have to LUG anything around. We often throw it in the backpack, and it doesn't take much room.

3) Battery life is awesome. This thing will go a few hours on the battery that comes with it, that is as long as you only use the view finder, using the LCD screen will cut that time down to about an hour.

4) The memory stick. This feature is what sold me on this camera. You can take digital photos on this thing called a memory stick, which is a piece of plastic the size of a stick of gum. You then take out the memory stick and pop it into an adapter which hooks right into the serial port on your PC. Special software lets you download the images directly to your hard drive to do whatever you want with (email, publish to web ... etc). This all comes with the camera. I found the serial adapter to be slow at transferring data so I bought the USB adapter and that's really fast ... no complaints anymore.

Cons
1) In dark light you have to use a flash to get good digital pictures (not video). The flash doesn't come with the camera so I had to buy it separately. Once I had the flash the pictures looked great.

2) You can't take digital video directly onto the memory stick for easy transfer to your PC.

A word of caution. All Digital video manufacturers claim that you can take digital pictures on them as well as video, and that you can transfer both images and video to your PC. While that is true, you would need a FireWire port on your PC to do that, as well as the accompanying cabling and software, you should check your PC is capable of this before buying. With the Sony, because it has the memory stick and accompanying hardware it REALLY IS EASY to transfer the digital photos to your PC. This is the only camera I saw that had this capability. The other DV cameras stored the digital photos directly on the DV tape ... I can't imagine what a nightmare it would be to try and retrieve the images from tape and transfer them to your PC. Note: this feature is available on the Sony as well, but is not needed due to the great memory stick.