Sony NSC-GC1 review

Conversely, the photo and video record buttons sit too low on the camera, below both the joystick and zoom rocker. The buttons feel far too small and shallow and can be difficult for large thumbs to press. Their small design and low placement combine to make the camera's two most oft-used controls doubly awkward to access.

Sony should have made the photo/video buttons larger, and set them higher to better rest under the thumb. Likewise, Sony should have turned the joystick into a full-fledged joypad and set it lower on the camera's back.

Features
Though intended for casual and budget users, the GC1 offers a few manual controls and scene presets for still photography. You can't adjust exposure or focus, but a Program mode gives you access to white balance and ISO sensitivity, two settings found increasingly rarely on budget pocket cameras. While the GC1 lacks a dedicated macro mode, a toggle switch next to the lens lets you physically flip between close-up -- 0.6 to one metre -- and normal -- one metre or further -- focus modes.

The camera includes a fixed f/3.5 lens at the equivalent of 42mm for still photos and 48mm for video. You can use digital zoom while shooting, but that function only crops and enlarges the picture to the point that, when you 'zoom' in the full 4x, you're looking at 1/4 the picture you should be getting. A cheap 3x optical zoom lens would have been preferable to this nigh-useless system.

Though they let you pull stills from video, the GC1's competitors lack the its still photo capabilities, but their lower prices make them far more tempting choices for inexpensive YouTube video capture.

Performance
At heart, this video camera aims solely at casual users who want to post their videos up on YouTube. While its QVGA and VGA clips look acceptable for the Web, they just aren't very good for much else. Its fixed-length lens forces you to either shoot at one distance, or let your video become notably pixelated and blurry as you digitally zoom in and out.

Without a microphone jack, the GC1's tiny onboard microphone presents your only audio recording option, and even when pointed directly at the audio source the recorded sound comes out tinny and muffled. Any sort of motion further degrades the video, filling clips with blur, camera shake and poor focus. While the GC1's movies might look decent in a tiny YouTube window, don't expect them to hold up well in any other medium.