Sony DCR-SR100 Standard Definition Hard Disk Camcorder

[Jerry Jones]

Review:

http://tinyurl.com/p7kqs

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Brian Ellis]

Fine, if you are willing to put up with MPEG-2 and poor colour rendering. Personally, a 10 foot barge pole is hardly long enough. For the same price, one is approaching the 3-CCD mini-DV region with much less compression.

[Enak]

I've used the JVC HDD camcorders before and was disappointed with the .MOD files which are a right PITA to play with...

But getting 10 hours of video off the camera in 20 minutes makes the process so easy. The quality was plenty good enough for me.

The Sony records direct to VBR .MPG files so you can put straight to DVD or edit natively. It looks good, even if it isn't up to 3CCD quality for the price, the convienience of having no tapes is well worth it.

[paulw]

I'm inclined to agree with Enak. There are allot of people out there who will jump at buying a hard disk camcorder for the convenience sake. Here's hoping that the Sony has more luck than JVC with the ability to edit files on a PC. If the price is rite down my part of the world I may consider getting one for quick and dirty videoing of a sport that we are are involved in but don't normally keep the files once seen..

[Jerry Jones]

I've worked with the JVC .MOD files and they're no different than standard .MPG files on my computer.

All I did was change the .MOD extension to be .MPG and the JVC files behaved just like typical MPEG files.

For me, the decision to buy an MPEG recorder as opposed to a DV .avi recorder simply depends on your specific job.

There are some jobs... that don't require heavy-duty compositing or editing... where an MPEG recorder would be so much easier than a DV .avi recorder that it would be the more logical choice.

Likewise, there are jobs... that do require compositing and lots of editing... where a DV .avi recorder makes more sense.

So I don't condemn MPEG recorders.

I say match each recorder to the type of job best suited for that particular video recording device.

To over-generalize and condemn one type of video recorder over the other is not logical, in my humble opinion.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Jerry Jones]

By the way, the color rendering of the Sony DCR-SR100 doesn't seem to be as bad as suggested previously in this thread:

According to the review:

"At 3000 lux, the DCR-SR100 had a good, even color balance, and sharpness nearly matching that of MiniDV (which has a much lower compression)."

http://tinyurl.com/p7kqs

Plus, I would suggest the rendering of 4:2:0 source material isn't much worse than DV's 4:1:1.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Brian Ellis]

4:2:0 is better than 4:1:1! Being in PALland, my mini-DV is 4:2:0 and I've found that greenscreening works MUCH better than a friend who tries to do the same in NTSCland. We have compared the results from the same source file, using MSP7 in both cases. There is much less "fringeing" in the PAL version. However, the MPEG and DV 4:2:0 colour spaces are not the same. The DV (all formats) YCbCr samples are always co-sited while the MPEG (all formats) are not, but are averaged from an offset (½ way for progressive, ¼ way for interlaced).

I believe the 4:1:1 DV format was chosen for NTSC DV because there is a full colour burst on every line, while PAL could use 4:2:0 because the dephased colour burst is on alternate lines.

[VJ]

Weird... Accoring to the review, the DCR-SR100 has video & audio in/out ports. One of the comments says that the DCR-SR90E is the European model, and it indeed it on our local website. However, it lacks the video/audio input ports...

I would love to get a compact camera to film some flying trips. And I would prefer it to use HDD.
But at the same time, I want a video/audio input... Yet I haven't seen it on any HDD based camera apart from the DCR-SR100 (not even on the DCR-SR90E).


Jörg

[Enak]

Another crippled european model to reduce the cost due to VAT.

[VJ]

Stupid...
I would be willing to pay extra for this functionality.


Jörg

[Enak]

Yep...