Sony HDR-SR12 10.2MP 120GB High Definition Hard Drive Handycam Camcorder with 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom by Sony
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Digital camera reviews of Sony HDR-SR12 10.2MP 120GB High Definition Hard Drive Handycam Camcorder with 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom
Digital camera Review: Great Product
Summary: 4 Stars
Order made From Amazon Apr 28:
shipment: Great on time no delay.
Product easy to handle, simple and intuitive. Had my vacation in Irlando with my kid made great videos.
Recodring time and battery time are excelent.
Backlite mode and manual settings are more difficult to get used to.
Stills shots however are dissapointing and the quality was less than expected.
Digital camera Review: Great camera & price
Summary: 5 Stars
A friend of ours has this camera so I already have seen how incredible it was, therefore I bought it. My friends are huge into technology with unlimited resources and they showed me this camera.
Add the extra battery to your order (the H70 is good enough unless you want the H100).
The video is great, camera easy to use, and Amazon had a fantastic price and quick delivery.
I will be ordering a huge television in the next few weeks from Amazon. They seem to be great to deal with.
Digital camera Review: Great camera BUT...
Summary: 4 Stars
Just took this on a three week foreign tour and it does a lot of things amazingly well. I did a lot of research and am quite knowledgeable, and was originally going to buy one of the new units that runs on flash cards because I liked their size. But they made too many compromise -- one of the worst of them being a lack of a viewfinder. I've never seen an LCD screen that wasn't washed out in sunlight (and this unit, while better than most, is no exception), so you NEED a viewfinder. Besides which, you get a lot less jiggling holding the camera up to your eye than holding it at arm's length to view an LCD screen.
The main caveat is its use of AVCHD as its recording format. This is another case of the hardware being ahead of the software. After extensive reading of the reviews of all the programs that currently exist, I've concluded that no one has yet come out with software to make editing this new format a simple affair. Sony's Vegas 8 (which costs $[...]+) seems, from the reviews and my limited testing, to come closest, but my expensive high-powered desktop (2 1/2 years old) stutters and chokes. AVCHD is highly compressed and requires a ton of CPU power. So, for now, I've decided to just show my raw footage to friends by connecting the camera directly to my HDTV, and wait until better software emerges or I'm ready to buy a new computer.
The quality and versatility of the camera are great, however, and I'm glad I didn't compromise to get a smaller unit. The hard drive helps give you a good solid grip using one hand, and I loved being able to stop worrying about running out of space (120gb is a huge amount of shooting).
Digital camera Review: Great camera but need lots of CPU power to edit video
Summary: 4 Stars
I moved from a Sony Hi-8 camera that we had for 5 years prior to this, and the first word out of my mouth was "Wow!"
The tape-based camera was great for an NTSC camera. The video and audio quality were great for home movies and the occasional training videos that I used it for at work. Aside from the fact that it was a standard def picture, the biggest complaint was for the need for tapes. Needless to say, that old camera is now gathering dust.
No tapes, no memory cards means that you can take hours and hours of video without having to worry about missing anything (except when your battery runs out, so keep a spare).
The 1080i video from this camera is great. For those who are looking for professional quality video, I doubt that any consumer model is going to do it, but this camera comes very close. People choose point-and-shoot cameras for convenience, and DSLRs for quality. To expect otherwise is to fool yourself. However, I have not been disappointed by this camera for shooting video. The size and weight are great. It's not too small or too light to give you shaky videos, and it's small enough to fit into a small camera bag.
The low light shots are still good, but a little grainy - as expected. You can use night shot mode, but then you get that eery effect. The daytime shots are better than anything that I've seen on my satellite HD channels. AVCHD still looks better than that super-compressed MPEG4 video that they're transmitting on satellite. The colors are vibrant, and the video is quite realistic. We recently used this to record a cooking demonstration at work, and the closeups, even on a cheap 720p 32" television were clear and detailed so that people 20' away could easily see what was going on. The camera's LCD display even had better picture quality than the television itself! I like the touch screen display to keep the camera's looks clean, without cluttering it with tons of buttons.
Although I prefer to use a DSLR to take still photos, the HDR-SR12 takes really nice pictures. The flash is quite bright, and the photos come out very crisp and vibrant. The Sony software utilities even allow you to take hi-res still shots out of the video, which is quite nice. Sometimes, during video, you see a shot that would make a great still shot, and you can easily extract it.
The Sony utilities are a nice way to download the videos and stills from the camera. It's a nice way to browse your collection, and supports converting files to other formats. It's a little slow, but fortunately, the latest version of Adobe Premier Elements handles AVCHD natively. However, you will need at least a dual-core processor to handle video editing at HD. Even then, it's very processor intensive, and you'll notice skips in audio and video as you try to work with the clips. Of course, converting to MPEG2 resolves those problems completely, but who wants low-res video except for on the Internet?
The standard battery that comes with it is good for about 1.5 hours of recording. I bought a second one that gets me almost 2.5 hours of recording. With just 2 batteries, you can handle most tasks.
I did have a problem with static using a Sony wireless mic, but I think that it's the mic's fault, and not the camera's.
A feature that at first seemed gimmicky to me was the face recognition. It recognizes faces, and indexes them so that you can quickly view clips that have that person in them. It's nice to be able to go through lots of video on the camera, find a family member, and play a specific clip of them.
Although this is a great camera, I do have a few reservations that keep me from giving it 5 stars:
1) I had to get a separate battery charger to avoid carrying around a huge AC adapter.
2) What happens when the hard drive fails? We all know that it will some time, but if you don't back up, you'll lose everything. It doesn't seem like a user-serviceable part either.
3) I had to buy the mini HDMI cable separately.
4) My computer's hardware is barely able to work with AVCHD video. That means that I'd have to consider going to a quad-core one to get better performance (assuming that the software can handle the extra processors). This isn't necessarily the camera's fault, but hi-def video is just cpu-intensive.
5) No easy way to make hi-def videos for friends and families who don't have a computer, Blu-ray players or memory card readers for their TVs.
6) Trying to the videos on a Mac (or an older PC) was a nightmare because you have to convert to MPEG2 before doing anything... There may be affordable software for the Mac that can support AVCHD by now.
Overall, this is the camera that I wanted, and still would buy again if I had the choice. I've had it for 7 months, and have not regretted it.
Digital camera Review: Great camera. Watch my videos for the proof
Summary: 5 Stars
This camera simply takes beautiful video, and stills. For all the proof you will ever need- [...] watch all the newest videos to see how it is in ALL lighting conditions, including night vision.