Sony Handycam HDR-SR7E review

Performance
Within the menus you'll find eight scene modes; 24-step exposure shift; manual, indoor, outdoor and auto white balance and manual shutter-speed adjustment between 1/2 and 1/500 seconds. Spot Focus and Spot Metre take advantage of the interface by letting you literally point at your subject.

You can assign one shooting adjustment setting -- manual focus, exposure compensation/exposure shift, white balance shift (toward red or blue) and shutter speed -- to control via the rather slippery CAM CTL dial. For shooting convenience, Sony provides its excellent SuperSteadyShot optical image stabiliser and Active Interface Shoe, plus Super NightShot infrared mode for when you need to record in the dark. Other niceties include a built-in electronic lens cover and a flash for still photos.

A relatively generous selection of jacks populate the SR7E, including the aforementioned mini-HDMI 1.3, component and AV outputs and a wired remote 2.5mm minijack. However, there's no USB port on the camcorder body -- it's on the Handycam Station dock, along with a button that will launch DVD burning. It would have been nice if Sony had put a full-size HDMI connector on the dock as well, at least until the mini connector becomes more popular.

Image quality
On its 60GB hard drive, the SR7E manages eight hours of best-quality, 2.1MB-per-second HD video. And that best-quality video looks pretty good. As with the HC7, the auto white balance could be a bit more neutral, but overall the colors emerge ballpark accurate and saturated. We probably wouldn't print the stills any larger than would fit on a letter-size sheet, but we tend to be a bit conservative when it comes to print sizes.

As usual with the Zeiss T* lenses, video renders sharply, especially when shot in conjunction with Sony's great Super SteadyShot optical image stabiliser. It helps that the lens doesn't have to stretch beyond 10x zoom -- that means neither the optical system nor the stabiliser face undue challenges.

The autofocus and metering systems also perform quite well. The SR7E renders correct exposures in a variety of situations ranging from overcast evening skies to glaring midday summer light. In a typical single-lamp living room environment it fares better than many competitors for sharpness, noise and colour. And the autofocus adapts relatively quickly to changes in position and zoom.

Conclusion
Like the HDR-SR1E before it, the Sony Handycam HDR-SR7E is an excellent HD camcorder that tries to deliver the promised convenience of hard-disk-based recording. But the lack of widespread software support remains an insurmountable inconvenience, holding us back from recommending it to all but the bravest of video geeks.

Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday