14 out of 14 people found this review helpful.
Sony TRV 950E
Date of Review: Sep 17, 2002
The Bottom Line: Great Camera, not great value, until price drops look at Canon XM2 instead, panasonic MX350 loses ease of use but is 3/4 of price of the sony.
As ever Sony come up with a very high quality semi-pro model, usual high video quality (3CCD, HAD CCD), usual range of manual controls (shutter speed, iris/aperture, gain, importantly -audio, white balance) in an easy to use package.
One nice addition would be a manual zoom ring, but then that only appears on cameras in the higher price range (XL1s. VX2k etc).
The Sony scores points over the equivalent Panasonic camera (MX350) in that it has individual buttons for each manual function where the Panasonic uses a single dial to control most things.
However the Sony retails at around #500 more than the MX350.
For this you do get a Bluetooth ready camera, but in my opinion this is a pretty useless function anyway, requiring a compatible (and more expensive) bluetooth laptop or phone.
As a gimmick it's ok, but most people using a camera like this would probably be intending to edit their footage before sharing it.
The Camera is more compact than it's predecessor, but it no longer features a built in ND filter, which will be missed.
The camera has the usual range of DV & AV in outs and a memory stick to take advantage of the almost 2 megapixel stills resolution.
I can't help but feel that if Sony dropped the still function & the bluetooth they would have a camera at 3/4 of the retail price and would clean the floor with the competition.
As it stands it is a good camera, but for the money the new Canon XM2 seems the better option (retaining the higher quality apocromatic flourite lens & nd filter, gaining 20x zoom and manual audio record levels over the XM1/GL1).
