Manual options include a few white-balance presets plus custom, shutter speed and a sort of gain-priority mode -- it allows you to boost the gain and automatically changes the aperture to compensate. You can also choose from a handful of exposure presets within the menus: sports, portrait, low-light, spotlight, and surf and snow.
Performance
Though it's fun and easy to shoot with, that's where the enjoyment stops. The most obvious problem we hit is its pitiful battery life. After fully charging the battery, we shot about 14 minutes of video and a handful of stills with a few flash shots, at which point it had dropped to about one-quarter of capacity. Plus, the focus is slow to lock. And once we got home, we couldn't help but be disappointed with the results.
Videos never achieve true sharpness and display severe interlace artefacts, and weaknesses are exacerbated by poor auto white balance -- the sensor is on the side of the camcorder for Pete's sake -- and inconsistent metering. For stills, throw in random flash exposures and a seriously overprocessed look that should settle the new maths argument once and for all: three 800,000-pixel sensors never equals one 3-megapixel image.
If it were cheaper, we might forgive the SDR-S150 some of its flaws. We want to -- its SD-based recording of MPEG-2 files is a compellingly attractive convenience. But until this convenience hits the right quality threshold, we recommend sticking with cheaper tape- and hard-disk-based models from Canon, Sony and JVC.
Additional editing by Nick Hide
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