Sony Handycam DCR-DVD101

The Sony Handycam DCR-DVD101 is more compact and offers better low-light focusing than its predecessor, but this model remains an underfeatured underachiever for a camcorder in its price range. The biggest problem: relatively poor video quality due to the low-resolution 340,000-pixel CCD the camera uses for recording.With its slick black-and-metallic-blue case, the Sony Handycam DCR-DVD101 is as likely as the latest iPod to garner admiring looks. This model is about two-thirds the size of its predecessor, the DVD100, making it no larger than a typical DV camcorder. It fits comfortably in your right hand and weighs under 1.3 pounds with disc and battery installed. The 3-inch DVD-R/DVD-RW drive sits on the right side of the unit and opens to the front so you can easily swap discs while the camera is mounted on a tripod.


The DVD101 includes manual exposure and focus options along with six auto-exposure presets. Sony often loads its camcorders with an abundance of special effects, but here they're limited to luminance keying, the ever-cheesy Old Movie mode, and the Sepia, Pastel, B&W, and Mosaic effects. The DVD101 offers Sony's trademark NightShot and Super NightShot infrared modes and a fader setting for scene transitions. It also features Sony's Intelligent accessory shoe for adding lights and other accessories.

The DVD101 records to write-once DVD-R or rewriteable DVD-RW discs. Using the latter discs, you gain some basic editing capabilities, including the ability to split, reorder, and delete scenes. When you finalize the disc, the DVD101 creates a DVD menu that you can use to navigate your clips on a set-top player. It can also create a video slideshow of any images on the disc. The camera lacks a Memory Stick slot, instead storing still images on DVD.

If your computer can read DVD-ROMs, file transfer is a snap--just drop the finalized disc in the drive. Otherwise, you can use the included USB cable to move video and stills to your PC; the camcorder mounts as a drive for easy transfer. Mac users are out of luck: Sony doesn't include any Mac software, and the DVD101 lacks a FireWire (or as Sony calls it, iLink) port.

The supplied composite/S-Video cable lets you connect to a television for playback or to another source to transfer video from analog devices to DVD. The bundled infrared remote is handy for controlling the camcorder in either application.The DVD101's biggest performance drawback--as with all DVD-recordable camcorders--is the time it takes the camcorder to spin up a disc and read its contents. We've clocked it at close to 30 seconds before the camcorder was ready to shoot.

Otherwise, the camcorder performed well. The Sony Handycam DCR-DVD101's comfortably placed zoom switch offers precise control, allowing you to zoom smoothly at a languid or zippy pace. Electronic image stabilization proved effective at wide angles and at up to medium zoom, but camera shake became evident at the 10X end of the camcorder's zoom range.