Nice Camcorder For The Price

Author's Rating:

Pros: Large side screen, clear video, easy to use and takes photos while recording.

Cons: Average battery life when using side screen and only 25x optical zoom.

The Bottom Line: 
I would definitely recommend this for the first time camcorder buyer or someone in the market for buying a nice family camcorder.

Author's Review
I bought this camcorder so that our family will finally have one of its own (I feel bad that we haven't had one for so long). A camcorder will be the first thing I give to my kids when they have children of their own, but I digress.

First of all, this is a very easy to use camcorder. After charging the battery you can pop in a tape and start recording right away. The touch screen menu makes tinkering with settings very easy to do. It also has a shortcut menu for placing your commonly accessed menu settings so they are easier to get to. There is even an "Easy" button for people that want to just point and shoot with minimal technical fuss.

Secondly, this camera is very, very light. It only weighs only a pound with the standard battery and a tape. It's also fairly small too.

The camcorder can simultaneously take low resolution photos while video recording and it can also be placed into photo mode to take 1.0 megapixel stills as well. Which isn't great by today's standards, but hey....it's a camcorder that can take digital photos in a pinch. You do have to buy a memory stick take still photos though.

The camera offers both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratio options and can record video and photos in whichever format that you prefer. This is a standard definition camera so when using the widescreen format you actually lose some resolution, but I'm ok with that until I can afford a HD camcorder.

I'm not overly ecstatic about the night shot capabilities, for me it seems like a gimmick that is more for fun than for serious video recording. The images are monochrome (green and black) and don't have very good clarity or contrast, but hey.....you can record video in nearly complete darkness. I say nearly complete darkness because it turns on red light to illuminate the area in front of the camera (or maybe it's there to warn people that you are recording in the dark...I'm not completely sure....but it's there).

There are a few shortcomings and I'll list them here. The battery life of the standard battery when using the side screen (rather than the small view finder) is pretty short. It will barely record 60 minutes when using the side screen, so until I buy a higher capacity battery I use the small view finder to record with most of the time. The optical zoom is only 25x which isn't that great compared to some other camcorders that have 40x, but the video is actually quite clear and crisp (for standard def). You can't remove the tape that you are recording on without the "End Search" feature getting disabled. The "End Search" feature will automatically cue the tape up to exactly the last place you were recording from so that you don't waste any of your tape on blank spots or accidentally record over something that you recorded previously.

Finally, the camcorder can be connected to your computer via the included USB cable and can be used as a very high quality web cam. The USB connection can also be used for downloading the photos from the memory stick so you don't have to buy memory stick reader if you don't have one. However, if you want to transfer your recorded video to your computer you will need to buy a Firewire cable. So far I've made a couple of my own DVDs and given them out to family and friends. It's pretty fun, but it can be quite a time consuming hobby.