Poor performance, high price

Author's Rating:

Pros: Smart styling, major controls are easy to operate

Cons: Video quality is poor, random "slow-motion" effect very annoying.

The Bottom Line: 
The image quality just isn't there, and isn't that what you buy a camera for? I'm frankly surprised Sony sells something this bad.

Author's Review
I received this camcorder for Christmas. I like the styling and the mini-DVD format, but the picture quality is terrible. On Christmas morning, my wife recorded me reading a book to my daughter while she sat on my lap. My daughter has brown hair, and I was wearing a forest green shirt, and in the video you can't tell where her hair ends and my shirt begins. What's even more disturbing is that the LCD viewfinder showed a much better picture than was recorded. Granted this was in a (moderately) low-light situation, but I have never experienced this with any of my other cameras.

One annoyance not mentioned in the other review has to do with the way the camera records the video. Apparently it stores the video in memory until it has enough to write to the disk, because you can see the "disk access" light flash on while you are recording. The problem with this is, if there is a lot of movement while it is accessing the disk, then the camera can't keep up and starts dropping frames. It's like the movie slips into slow-motion at random intervals.

The major controls are easy to use, and well-placed. Start/stop record is under your right thumb, and the zoom is located under the right index finger. One feature I liked was the variable zoom speed. If you move the zoom lever a little bit, it will slowly zoom, but if you move it more then the zoom gets faster. It makes it easier to use the zoom in an unobtrusive fashion. The camera also has a selection of video effects like "old time movie" (filters everything to a sepia tone and drops the frame rate) and "detailed close up" (changes the focal length to make objects in the background blurry and less distinct). I haven't played with these, so I really can't comment on how well they work.

One thing mentioned in the other review was the long time it takes to finalize a disk. While it does take awhile, it's nowhere near thirty minutes per disk. I recorded a full disk, and it took about two and a half minutes to finalize. The manual says that the time it takes to finalize is proportional to the amount of free space left on the disk, so I think in most cases it should take less than five minutes.

I've had good luck with my other Sony products, but I think this one's going to go back to the store. I may pick up one of their mini-DV (tape) models, or I may just stick with my old Hitachi unit, which hasn't given me any trouble in the 5+ years I've owned it (aside from the ni-cad battery dying, but they all do that eventually).