Sony Handycam DCR-SR100 user reviews

bigpapanoodle 26 February 2008

Good: Comfortable to handle, viewfinder

Bad: Not much really

Comment: Had been looking around for a long time for a hard-disc camcorder. I was at the end of my tether with my old JVC tape dinosaur - too many golden moments lost to waiting for the tape to load up then record. Worst of all, I kept getting error codes and then it would freeze up.
My first impression was how well it fitted my hand. So comfortable! Your hand was designed around this with all the buttons in easy reach of either your thumb or forefinger. Next thing was how quickly after switching it on it was ready to shoot. Press the toggle switch once and you are ready to start recording video. Press it again and its ready to take a still photo. Once again and you are in playback mode. Again and you are back to where you started...simple.
The colour viewfinder was always on my list of "must haves" and this was another deciding factor in choosing this camcorder. Nice to have the option of choosing screen or viewfinder I always feel.
The camcorder records to the MPEG2 format which can be a bit awkward to edit. The bundled software allows you to cut out unwanted scenes but not much more than that, sadly. I have managed to edit a short video in Windows Movie Maker but that is better suited to .avi files. Tended to get many screen freezes.