Sony DCR-HC40 Mini DV Digital Camcorder

Author's Rating:

Pros: compact! Great analog video. Easy to use. Good low-light solutions. Clean audio.

Cons: Unexpectedly poor stills. Broke twice. Learning more about digital video than I really wanted.

The Bottom Line: 
Good camcorder, but not the perfect solution it appeared to be; I expected better from Sony.

Author's Review
I bought this camera as a new parent, hoping to preserve some of those precious early moments. I was excited that a megapixel still with high-quality optics would print well at up to 5x7, so I wouldn't generally need to also carry a camera. I expected that with the USB and Firewire ports I would be able to easily dump full-quality video to a computer for editing and DVD archival.

The high-resolution stills appear pixelated no matter how small you print them; somehow Sony's translation from the pixel layout on the CCD to the pixel layout in a JPG file is just plain not accurate and no amount of feathering will fix it. I'm also seeing a "washed out" look in photos of bright colors. So don't think Zeiss optics and a megapixel CCD mean you'll have at least snapshot grade photos.

The descriptions I saw neglected to mention the (large, reversible) touch screen. There are manual overrides buried in menus, but they would be cumbersome to use and I think a tripod would be required. Fortunately, the unit is highly automated, and the automation works well, with one exception: in bright light or high-contrast environments, the automatic exposure oscillates every couple of seconds (dark, light, dark, light) and I have to go into the menus and find the manual "spot" exposure. It is very compact. The battery life is very useful and I don't worry about using the LCD. The camcorder works well in low light, and the audio is free of motor noise.

Since my real target is ultimately a DVD, I wish I'd looked closer at camcorders that write directly to DVD. The USB port can only provide VCD (mpg1) quality video, so I now also own a firewire card and cable.

The DCR-HC40 Sony starter kit (sold separately) contains a bag that won't hold the AC adapter and cables, a low-capacity battery, and a low grade tape that doesn't support the Cassette Memory feature which is highly recommended in the manuals; I recommend picking out your accessories separately, other bags are availabe for it.

POSTSCRIPT: This unit just broke for the second time and returned to Sony for another repair under warranty. Turnaround was about 2 weeks; both times the unit was returned rattling loose in the box without packing materials, causing at least some minor finish wear. Problem was eventually identified as a batch of bad charging circuit components, and mine wasn't the only one to fail.