Sony Dcr - Sr 100 Hard Disk Camcorder

[jbowman1993]

I have owned this Sony camcorder for about 1 month now, and I have nothing but praise for it.

It produces wonderful movies. Picture quality is great, as is the sound. Low light recording is very good. The ease of using a camcorder with a hard disk puts all other models to shame. It is so simple to download movies to my PC, edit them as I see fit, and burn them onto DVD's. Recording time is amazing on the 30 gig hard drive. 7 hours on high quality, 10 on medium or 21 on normal quality (which is still quite watchable).

People complain about electronic's prices being higher here in LOS, but I bought the Sony for 38,000 baht, which is what it is selling for everywhere in the US. It was listed at 39,999, but they gave me a small discount at the Sony Store, and threw in a free tripod, and a Dvd about taking quality home movies.

Bought mine at the Sony Store in Central Pinklao. Just wanted to share!

[Firefoxx]

It's been stated before, but each format has its good and bad points, the harddisk recorder included. Since you have already stated the good points, I will jump into the bad.

First, the media is not replaceable. This means that you can never bring along extra media for extra filming time, aside from lugging a notebook along. This also means that if your media is faulty, then you can't replace it by yourself, but need to send it to a service center. Harddisks are complicated things, and therefore fairly easy to break.

Next, the video compression. Even on high, it's inferior to cheaper standard miniDV. It's just a fact of the high compression. One thing that's changed is that the files are actually .mpgs now, and can be edited by most video editors (unlike previous models). The overall quality is much improved over JVC's models, but still not as good as a decade old standard. Low light performance actually is average, not good, not bad.

Third, the price. You get a relatively low-end camcorder at a middle-end price, but that's what you pay for new tech.

Overall, I say the tech is improving, but still doesn't merit changing from miniDV. MiniDV also hasn't been standing still... it now is used in HDV, which supports HDTV-quality video on miniDV tapes (I have one). I really don't see how editing DV is all that complicated relative to HDD-based camcorders... but most people don't really want to get into it.

[cclub75]

Overall, I say the tech is improving, but still doesn't merit changing from miniDV.

A very comprehensive and interesting test of this new Sony.

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/Sony-...rder-Review.htm

I've been using the JVC Everio (old model) since 1.5 years. I think i'm going to change for this Sony...

[Firefoxx]

That's actually the article I referenced. As you can see, the pioneers in the HDD field (JVC) perform horribly, and the Sony itself is just so-so. But if you just positively absolutely hate tapes, at least it's better than miniDVD camcorders.