Sony's new Handycam DCR-SR80, DCR-SR60 and DCR-SR40 hard drive camcorders
By Ryan Block 
posted July 19th 2006 8:01AM
posted July 19th 2006 8:01AM
posted July 19th 2006 8:01AM
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I just needed to say, those are sexy as hell. Can't wait to see some full reviews of them on release.
as long as the compatibility with editing softwares is not guaranteed, i'll stick with my good ol' mini DV tapes... but this goes in the right direction for sure.
i REALLY dont understand the demand for hard drive based camcorders. maybe it would be nice to not have to deal with discs, but when its full, you're done. that would be a real hassle on a two week trip without access to a computer with a DVD burner.
now, throw a 500 GB vertical drive in there....
"price point" is not synonymous with "price". A price point is a psychological threshold related to purchase decisions. So, for example, $500 is a price point because consumers often use this as a cutoff (eg for electronics).
Every product has price points in a given market: say $150,000 and $200,000 for houses; $1,000, $1,500 and $2,000 for notebooks.
But I very much doubt that there is such a thing as a $600 price point for camcorders. Instead, I would guess camcorder price points are probably something like $300, $500 and $1000.
Your comments: farris: Looks like Sony has anticipated your problem:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/dvd/sony-launches-dvdirect-recorders-for-pcfree-dvd-burning-188314.php
quibbler: "engadget" is not synonymous with "good English".
Annoying, but it's the price you pay for getting up to the minute
technology news. If English is your priority, try the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/default.stm
They
cover the big stories a couple of days after this place and the English is great...
farris if you are using 14 hours of camera time for a vacation i really feel sorry for your friends that have to watch it.... 'what are we going to do for the next 14 hours, we could watch all three lord of the ring movies back to back, na lets watch farris' vacation to utah instead!' lol just messing with you. ;-)
Call me old skool, but yea, I agree. Just give me some ol' fashion dv tapes. Much more reliable that anything I've seen so far. What happens when the hdd crashes? At least with tapes if it gets tangled I just slip in a new tape. Unless those hdd are easily removable it's going to be a hassle replacing them if something goes wrong.
1MP CCD?! That doesn't sound very good looking. JVC has had hard drive camcorders out for awhile now and the quality is crap I heard. I was thinking of getting one until I read reviews on garbage quality.
JT hit it on the head -- it's in the right direction. Most folks with money in their pocket today are still attached to tapes. But there will be a growing market segment that wants HD-based cameras. To some extent it's probably just a different customer. I'm one of them. Tapes suck and in my usage with the Canon I have today I almost never need to use another tape before I get back to my hotel room. Sorry folks, a younger customer is around the corner with money in their pocket. By the time Sony gets this form factor right the customers will be waiting. In the meantime, I'm buying one of these as soon as they come out.
$800, thats pretty cheap for HD and 60 gig...
are they really high-definition?
i can see they are HDD,
These aren't 3-CCD cameras, are they? I'm a novice, but I always thought 3-CCD cameras where the true ticket to a quality image... Can someone (who knows more than me) address this?
"Call me old skool, but yea, I agree. Just give me some ol' fashion dv tapes. Much more reliable that anything I've seen so far. What happens when the hdd crashes? At least with tapes if it gets tangled I just slip in a new tape. Unless those hdd are easily removable it's going to be a hassle replacing them if something goes wrong."
I've had nothing but trouble with tapes, hello HDD (and eventually flash mem or MRAM), good riddance to tapes. Tape transport has got to be one of the most fragile things out there. Not to mention tape sticking to heads due to humidity, head misalignments, tape oxide shedding. And ultimately (for those of us who do online editing) you need to get it into file form on your computer anyways, so this just eliminates one more step in the process.
I must say, there is nothing more productive than insulting a news site's grammar on it's own comments page.
If you read the reviews out there, you're see that the Sony single CCD/CMOS, HDD camcorders rate higher than the JVC's HDDs with 3CCDs.
I've shot a lot of DV tape doing independent film. The only thing really good about DV tape is that it's solid for archival puposes. I have tapes now that are over 10 years old and play back fine. The downside to tape is that everything has to be done in realtime including the transfer over to the computer and the playback and so on. Tape also wears out the recording heads of the camera itself. Plus of course tapes cost extra money.
I rarely shoot video these days just fo the fun of it and the reason is because I hate wasting tape. With a hard drive camera I would feel more free to experiment. Lets just hope that these units easily allow the hard drives to be replaced should they go bad.
It would have ben nice if sony would have made these AVCHD cameras. I wonder what codec they do use for their standard definition?
Nice of Sony to finally get around to releasing these... it's only been the better part of a year since JVC was the first to market... I thought Sony would be able to reverse-engineer and copy their design much faster than this.
If these drives are hackable (i.e. are able to be switched with larger drives) I cannot wait untill Sony releases a true HD/3CCD prosumer model that incorporates this technology.
A $100-500 100+ GB drive is much better than the $1000+ price tag on Panasonics P2 cards-- but then again the P2 cards are flash based which helps with the conditions alot of camcorders are put in.
For now I will stick to my 10+ year old VX1000. Cameras like these HDD models will be excellent for home videos and the like.
Actually, you're both wrong, Quibbler and Engineer. The term is accurate, and we pride ourselves on the high quality of our editorial.
price point
n.
The retail price of a product, usually when viewed as one of a series of possible competitive prices: expected to release the software below the $50 price point.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=1&q=price%20point
The final price in the list, compared to the other two prices, was used with the term "price point" for comparative purposes. Maybe you should check the dictionary, Quibbler, before you get grammarian in front of thousands of people.
hah hah!
Grammarian is a noun, not a verb. *grins*
actually, grammarian is used as an adjective there, not a verb.
*grins even larger*
They did it again!
*They didn't provide progressive support, you have to mess again with interlaced picture when most displays in production today are of progressive nature!
*This format requires a ...supercomputer to edit, even a year later chances are, you'll still need the latest and fastest computer beast!
*So Consider this as shoot -transfer to computer -burn to Blu Ray/HD-DVD - with on editing solution!
Correction: At the last line, read "...with No editing solution!"
I am suprised no one has mentioned that the video is encoded into MPEG2, a lossy format. Sucks to edit with. miniDV records in an lossless AVI format... Not only that, but rendering DV AVI is about 10 time quicker than mpeg2.. Course, if you aren't ever going to edit it (other than in the camera), then hey, it's a great way to go...
I've got a DCR-SR80 and love it so far. My last Sony camcorder (8 mm, digital) died due to a problem with the tape loading mechanism. This is the weakest link with tape camcorders and I didn’t want to have to deal with this problem again. The HD camcorder does away with this moving parts weak link and replaces it with proven HD technology which is a much more reliable weak link.
The next technology wave will be flash memory units with absolutely no moving parts (except switches and lenses) and removable media to eliminate the possibility being stuck after filling the HD (unlikely) while away from a PC to download video to. My kids have “Video Now” video cameras that do just this but the video resolution leaves a lot to be desired. The fact this can done at all and for only $60 is amazing.
With advances in mass storage and video compression technology storing raw video and audio on computer hard drives is dirt cheap and becoming cheaper all the time.
Test.
so how do I actually import and edit these mpeg files. the old vaio software only recognizes this as audio. no where do I find a really good way to edit the images yet. GREAT camera.. except this
Does not work with a Mac??
What's with that? I've posted my conversation (chat) with Sony on my blog: www.chrisbaggott.com
It's really frustrating because this seemed like it would be great but I've now got 15 hours of video I can't get off unless I buy a third party software.