Sony offers up HDR-CX100 HD Handycam alongside three lowly SD models

If you shuddered at the sight of Sony's GPS-packin' HDR camcorders, the outfit has a much milder, calmer set headed your way. The all new Flash Handycam line strips away most of the dazzling features on the aforementioned family, though one of the four still keeps the most important bit: high-def recording. The flagship HDR-CX100 logs clips at 1,920 x 1,080 and captures 4 megapixel stills, but the privilege will cost you $600. For that, you'll also get Face Detection, Smile Shutter, 8GB of embedded flash memory, a Memory Stick PRO Duo card slot, 10x optical zoom, 2.7-inch LCD monitor and a choice of black, silver or red. If that's still too far out of your league, it's also introducing a trio of flash-based SD models: the 16GB DCR-SX60, 8GB DCR-SX41 and 4GB DCR-SX40, which will cost about $370, $300 and $270, respectively.

Sony offers up HDR-CX100 HD Handycam alongside three lowly SD models

[Fanfoot Posted Jan 7th 2009 10:41PM]

Since all of the DVD-based camcorders pretty much sucked video-quality wise, I guess the obvious question is "what's the bit rate on the AVCHD encodes" on these flash-based units? I presume they won't tell us, so we'll just have to wait for somebody to post a review, but even a quick back of the envelope calculation on free space remaining after recording a short clip should give you a general idea...

From the press release it looks like the HD unit only has 8GB of flash, which seems vaguely ridiculous actually. They claim this is 3 hours worth in LP mode, which means a rate around 6Mbps or so, which means it might be vaguely XBox HD/Apple TV HD ish if the encoder inside this thing were as good as the one the studio used to encode the videos for those systems (hint: it isn't). Sounds like the video quality will be kind of soft. But presumably there are other modes in which it'll record higher quality... any idea Engadget?

[(Unverified) Posted Jan 8th 2009 7:21AM]

all current Sony AVCHD cameras allow you to record in an HQ mode that is at 16Mbps

[Bratan Posted Jan 8th 2009 2:47PM]

Sony can take their Memory Stick and stick it where sun don't shine. I can't believe they still stubbornly refuse to accept SDHC memory embraced by the rest of the world...