Sony Handycam DCR-DVD505E review

Performance
The Sony Handycam DCR-DVD505E suffers from none of the sluggish performance that affected early generations of DVD camcorders. Start-up takes only a few seconds, and there's barely any delay between when you press Record and its beginning to capture video. Not only are stills saved quickly to Memory Stick Duo, but you can even grab stills without interrupting video capture.

The camcorder's automatic adjustments react very quickly. Panning from brightly lit to dimmer subjects, the DCR-DVD505E swiftly and accurately adjusts focus and exposure for the new shooting conditions. The only time that automatic focus doesn't work well is in complete darkness using the NightShot mode, where it has problems locking on distant objects. Manual focus is available, and the large LCD makes it a viable option, though the touch-screen controls are sluggish and unnatural compared to a traditional focus ring. Image stabilisation is very effective through most of the zoom range, with slight shaking noticeable at only the full 10x zoom.

Spot exposure works very well for bringing out details in situations with dramatic lighting contrasts. With a bright sky background, for instance, we could touch the sky to bring out details in the clouds or adjust exposure to the landscape below.

The 89mm widescreen LCD is excellent in all respects -- it's one of the nicest displays we've seen on a consumer camcorder. It's large enough to make spot focus and exposure useful, it offers solid detail and it remains viewable even in bright sunlight. However, the LCD coating picked up noticeable fingerprints, and given the touch-screen interface, fingerprints are unavoidable. The colour viewfinder offers decent detail, though its 4:3 aspect ratio makes for a small image when you're shooting in widescreen 16:9 mode.

The 5.1-channel microphone does a great job of picking up both close and distant sounds. Stereo separation is very good for a built-in microphone, though front/back positioning was rarely discernable -- as expected, the front audio is emphasised. The optional Bluetooth microphone delivered excellent clarity, and its use of the centre channel for recording makes the surround sound far more noticeable during playback. The built-in microphone's placement directly on top of the camcorder gives good coverage to sounds both in front of and behind the DCR-DVD505E and alleviates the lack of a wind filter.

The supplied battery offers just 40 minutes of recording time under typical conditions. Though this is fairly short, you'll be stopping every 20 minutes to swap discs anyway, at which point you can swap in an optional extended-capacity battery, which can last as long as two hours.

Image quality
The most interesting development in the Sony Handycam DCR-DVD505E is the 8mm Sony ClearVid CMOS. It's a sensor with 2 million photosites -- what we usually consider a 2-megapixel sensor -- that's rotated 45 degrees off its typical axis. Plus, green filters comprise two-thirds of its RGB colour filter array (CFA), compared to only half in a Bayer CFA used by the typical sensor. In theory, this should yield a sharper image -- the green channel is generally the cleanest, best-resolved channel from a sensor, so adding one-third more image data should increase the signal-to-noise ratio. Furthermore, the rotation decreases the distance between the centre of adjacent pixels (known as pixel pitch), without having to reduce the pixel size, which would reduce the chip's sensitivity.

The ClearVid CMOS delivers on its promised video-quality improvements. Image quality is noticeably better than that of the DCR-DVD505E's predecessor, the already-impressive 3.3-megapixel DCR-DVD403E. Sharpness and detail rival those of some prosumer single-CCD MiniDV cameras, with very good resolution overall. Dynamic range is decent, with detail loss in shadowed or highlighted areas evident only when a shot has dramatic contrasts in lighting. Colour is relatively accurate and well saturated in normal lighting. Automatic and manual white-balance settings both work well, but the One Push white-balance setting gives footage a noticeable bluish cast when shooting in natural light.

Generally, DVD's biggest quality issue compared to MiniDV is artefacts, a result of the extensive compression necessary to fit footage on disc. Though some compression artefacts were noticeable in our footage, particularly when playing back on a projection TV, the compression quality was the best overall that we've seen on a DVD camcorder. Areas with tightly spaced parallel lines, such as a home heating vent, showed some compression shimmer. But generally, colour gradations, complex textures such as grass, and other typical victims of compression remained smooth and shimmer-free.

Outdoor-lit footage showed almost no graininess. Indoors, the DCR-DVD505E is a more average performer. Footage is noticeably grainy in dimmer conditions but less so than many competing single-CCD cameras. The NightShot mode does a good job of maintaining a clear, albeit green-toned, image even in total darkness. The colour slow-shutter mode keeps hues more accurate, but as the environment dims, the footage gets increasingly blurry.

Photo quality is very good for a camcorder, particularly considering that it's interpolating a 4-megapixel image from a 2-megapixel CCD. Images lack some detail compared to those of dedicated still cameras, but overall, they're sharp enough for acceptable 100x150mm (4x6-inch) prints, and they boast decent colour. The flash works well when capturing in dimmer situations, though we found its red-eye-reduction mode ineffective. When capturing stills at the same time that you're shooting video, the flash doesn't fire, so indoor stills captured this way are likely to be grainy or blurry.

Edited by Lori Grunin
Additional editing by Kate Macefield