8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
All Around Camcorder
Date of Review: Aug 5, 2005
The Bottom Line: Highly recommend
I've been following this technology for several years watching for the quality and reliability of these units to improve to a better than satisfactory level; price also needed to come down. I've used camcorders in the past by borrowing friends units and most of the time you would say to yourself, this is hard to watch because nothing about what you were watching was true. The colors where poor, the clarity was poor, and the sound was awful. Most of us know that these types of technology take years to perfect before they are truely ready, but marketing and the fact that a lot of people have to have the latest technology, whether or not it's ready, quality is overlooked.
Premise:
Being a very technical person, people can easily get caught up in the technical aspects of the product and forget about what they are actually buying the product for. Basically I wanted a camcorder that had very good video, very good sound, and acceptable low light performance. That's essentially what a camcorder should be about. The first two ingredients are the most important, bar none. What's the point of taken a video if the sound is crappy or vise versa. Too many camcorders out there have crappy sound.
This camcorder has excellent video with very rich colors due to the 3 CCD's and in the auto mode adjusts to the scenes very well. There are times when the manual mode comes in handy when you need to make adjustment to the scene you are filming; this unit has adjustments for many different scenarios. The audio is also excellent.
Now for the low light. I'm amazed that the unit can handle low light situations as well at it does considering I've done some filming with extremely low light. The thing to watch for is that you cannot film things that are moving to quickly. You will need to increase the surrounding light in order to get a good video. The video can be 'jerky' at very low light situations but that's due to the unit trying to over expose the scene with as much light as possible; slowing the filming down. I have tried this when it was almost dark and this unit will not do it. On the other hand filming a lunar eclipse was amazing. For most low light situations (not dark) it performed very well.
Overall:
The units controls and menus are very well layout and can be easily mastered after only a few outings. The downloading to my pc was straight forward an uneventful. Burning to a DVD and playing the video on our Sony 42" LCD is amazing. The colors are true and the sound amazing. This technology has finally arrived for the general consumer.
