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CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 09/23/2002
- Updated on: 10/15/2002
- Released on: 03/15/2002
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 The MicroMV cassette inside the camcorder is like a bonsai version of a MiniDV tape. |
The camera's extreme portability comes at a price, however. There's not a lot of free real estate, which means that the physical controls are shrunken and consolidated.
Our biggest beef was with the tiny wide/telephoto toggle that zooms the 10X Carl Zeiss lens; manipulating it requires slender fingers and a certain amount of practice.
The five-way control button behind the 2.5-inch LCD on the other side of the camera was easier to use as we navigated menus, but we found ourselves wishing for a separate Select button.
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| Small controls can be bad news for fumble-fingered users. | The zoom lens uses a tiny toggle. |
We can hardly imagine a less convenient way to type an e-mail message than using the camera's four-way switch to move a cursor over an onscreen mock-up of a cell phone's dialpad. Fortunately, the camcorder saves not only the addresses that you've entered but also the subject line and the messages, so it takes just a few button-pushes the second time you want to mail Grandma a digital still with the message "Hving fun, will call 2nite." You can save still images and Web-quality video clips on a Memory Stick, then e-mail them or upload them to a free account at Sony's ImageStation site.
 You can save still shots and MPEG video on the included Memory Stick. |
 A remote control and wireless Bluetooth adapter come with the camera. |
Cumbersome text entry aside, the Bluetooth features worked as advertised; once you've done the initial setup, just plug the Bluetooth transceiver into any phone jack for Web and e-mail access right on the camcorder's LCD.
 Built-in memory on each of the tiny MicroMV cassettes stores a thumbnail index of your video clips. |
 Input/output ports. |
The camera also offers plenty of shooting features through the LCD menus, including effects presets for shooting different types of scenes, manual exposure and focus, and a way to combine video footage with stills in-camera.
In VCR mode, the camera allows you to search a thumbnail index for the footage you want--a convenient perk made possible by 64K of built-in memory on each MicroMV cassette.
There's a cost to the MicroMV format's small size: it needs to compress the video more than MiniDV. While MiniDV footage is compressed within each frame, MicroMV adds the frame-to-frame compression of MPEG-2. This means that objects that don't move or change are recorded once, then played back for as long as they remain stationary. To the user, this translates into a theoretical drop in quality when compared to MiniDV, with the likeliest problem being motion artifacts--blocky, pixelated footage that occurs if your subject is moving too fast, if there are a lot of sudden color changes, and so forth. That said, we didn't notice any such problems.
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 Automatic exposure doesn't match that of MiniDV models. |
Overall, the IP7BT's video quality was difficult to distinguish from that of Sony's DCR-PC110 MiniDV camcorder, which we used for comparison. The major difference between the two was that the autoexposure function of the IP7BT was a bit less reliable. We had to manually adjust exposure when shooting footage of buildings against a broad swath of sunlit sky, whereas the MiniDV model yielded acceptable results in auto mode.
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