Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Tickets to Disneyland are expensive, sufficiently so that when my wife decided that I should record the memories in moving pictures rather than stills, the price of the camcorder was almost certain to be unimportant. If recording the Disney experience would cost me less than the Disney experience itself, then the camera could be relegated to the "acceptable collateral damage" column of my planned budget.
The price of this camcorder isn't bad, but I've decided that camcorder pricing in general is a dishonest racket. The battery that comes with this camcorder is good for less than an hour of recording. When you're going to Disneyland, 45 minutes just isn't enough. You need to buy a bigger battery (I went with the biggest, 10 hours), and for that you'll pay almost a third of the price of this camcorder (less on Amazon, but I didn't have the luxury of waiting the several weeks they said it would take to get the battery). You need to buy a camera case. You need to buy a battery charger. You need to buy at least six DVDs (that gives you a bit under three hours of standard recording time). By the time I bought the stuff I needed to go with the camcorder, I'd spent about half the price of the camcorder itself. Plan to spend at least $200 more than the price of the camcorder on accessories if you want to take it on vacation with you. The collateral damage to your budget will always be greater than the price of the camera.
That said, this camcorder performed very well. It's very easy to use, and with a little practice I learned to record events one-handed while watching said events unfold in front of my eyes, not just on the screen. That is, once I got the camera going I could occasionally start watching my kids and stop watching the camcorder screen. Score a big one for the stabilization feature. The menus on the screen are easy to navigate, and the screen responds nicely to touch. I didn't have to push too hard, and it didn't respond to the passing of my finger over one button on its way to another.
The image quality is very nice. The zoom feature works very smoothly, and 25X optical zoom is more than enough to catch your kids' expressions of horror and delight when they're on a ride and your feet are planted on blessedly solid ground. And if you have to ride with them, well, I've nauseated friends and family with my clip of scenery zooming by while my kids made our tea-cup spin as fast as the mechanism would allow. I filmed at standard quality, and it shows nicely on a 32" HD TV. It looks grainy on a 42" screen.
The autofocus works pretty well when the lens isn't zoomed. I used it at full zoom in a large auditorium when my son's kindergarten class sang last month. I was seated about 150 feet back and the auditorium was dark. He kept going in and out of focus. I pulled back the zoom and the focus settled down. The sound was good, but I was bothered to hear my own whispers to my wife when I played back the video. I'd prefer that the microphone give more prominence to sound in front of the camera and less to sound that's in back.
If I had it to do over again, I'd probably buy a hard-drive camcorder rather than a mini-DVD camcorder. The DVDs are just more stuff you have to carry around in your bag, and the odds are you'll have to change the DVD at an inopportune time (e.g., right when your daugther is discovering just how long and wet a giraffe's tongue is). If, like me, you're a Mac owner, you'll find that Sony camcorders work pretty well with iDVD and iMovie. But my four-year old iMac doesn't support this camcorder. Newer ones do (we're upgrading, so no big deal for us). The video software that comes with the camcorder is only for Windows; it will only support still photos on Mac.
(An update on the above: No, new Macs do NOT support this camcorder. To download video to iMovie requires either that your camcorder have a firewire port or that it produce files in MPEG4 format. This camcorder has no firewire port and records in MPEG2. The fix that I've found is a program (e.g., Popcorn2) that will convert MPEG2 to MPEG4. It's not elegant and is mighty annoying, but it gets the job done. If you're a Mac owner, life will be simpler with another camcorder.)
On balance I like this camcorder. I'd like it more if it came with a bigger battery, a battery charger (you can charge a battery in the camera, but it takes a lot longer), and Mac compatible software. And if that touch-screen had a finish that weren't so easy to smudge.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Sony DCR-DVD308 1MP DVD Handycam Camcorder with 25x Optical Zoom
Instantly capture and share all your moments with the DCR-DVD308 Handycam(R) camcorder. Record directly to DVD-R/-RW/+RW/+R Dual Layer discs while you`re shooting. The Carl Zeiss(R) Vario-Tessar(R) Lens with 1 megapixel CCD masterfully captures every image, while the built-in microphone records audio in 5.1 channel surround sound. Screen your masterpiece on the generous 2.7" wide touch panel hybrid LCD monitor. And once you`ve finished shooting, share it easily on DVD or transfer to your computer with the USB 2.0 connection. Fast and easy, the DCR-DVD308 shoots and shares video in a class all of its own.
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