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Sony DVD Camcorder - What To Get & What To Avoid At All Costs.
2008 may be the last year you see a new Sony DVD camcorder. The camcorder manufacturers new best friends, the hard disk drive and Flash memory formats, offer the one thing that a DVD disc could never achieve...long recording times! It wasn't too much of a problem with standard definition DVD camcorders, but it's become too much with the introduction of HD for our shiny round friend. The standard DVD disc can only record about ten minutes of full high definition video. You can see that something has to give. And that something will be the DVD, as manufacturers, including Sony are gently easing it out this year by including internal flash drives up to 16GB and flash memory slots to their DVD camcorders to give their customers the extra capacity needed. It lives on for now though and Sony have introduced two new high definition models, the HDR-UX10 ($799 MSRP) and the HDR-UX20 (See picture above - $999 MSRP) and four standard definition models, the DCR-DVD610 (See picture below - $349 MSRP), DCR-DVD710 ($399 MSRP), DCR-DVD810 ($479 MSRP), and DCR-DVD910 ($649 MSRP). In the standard definition arena, the Sony DCR-DVD508 released late 2007 was not so well recived, as Sony tried to cram in the pixels to impress the buying public and subsequently, it's 'low light' ability suffered badly and let the side down. It's never a great thing to recommend you buy the previous model from last year, but in this case, the Sony DCR-DVD408 is a much better option and performs much better in low light. Which goes to show the newer model isn't always the better one.
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The HDR-UX1 was their first HD Sony DVD camcorder, released in late 2006 and was generally well received. There were issues, which still exist today to be fair, regarding the AVCHD compression format, but it's arrival on the scene caused a great deal of excitement.
