Sony DCR-DVD505 Handycam camcorder

Pros: Very easy to use, takes good stills

Cons: Price point

Summary: It is no surprise that some techno-snubs would have criticisms for this product, especially at the $ 1,000.00 price point. I actually got mine for $ 899.00. I suppose to the true video head, the sharpness of the video images could be better, still I think it depends on what medium you are viewing the disk from. Playing the video thru my new DPL, with the new DVD player with S-video cable made a huge improvement over the standard hook up on my Toshiba projection, but I must say the video on both my big screens is much better then my old tape driven camcorder.

Like all products you purchase, its worthiness depends a great deal on what you want to do with it. My kids play sports so I am interested in recording sporting events, the nice thing about this machine is its ability to record video and shoot stills at the same time. So for example, when recording my daughter who is a pitcher, I can take stills when she is preparing to pitch and not interrupt the video of her set-up and subsequent pitch; this is very convenient to me. The camcorder takes good to fair pictures; again for sporting events they are perfectly fine. The pictures are perfectly acceptable in most formats but this camcorder will not replace a good 4MP stand alone camera in quality and depth of pictures.

For me the slow motion function is really worth the extra money I spent. I can analyze the swings or pitching motions of my players in great detail, in my case this is a dream come true.

The touch screen has come under some criticism, but again I find it a very useful feature when playing back recorded video and setting up camera functions. I’m not sure why anyone would object to this, true, finger prints do get on the screen but they are easily cleaned.

A quick word about the recording time, I was very concerned about the short recording time ½ hour. In practice however, a half hour is a lot of video and you can change the disks in about 10 sec. So it has not been an issue. I have not yet tried the Long Play feature which gives you about 1 hour. Again, I mostly shoot sporting events so there are plenty of opportunities to change disks, however, if you are shooting a long lecture or even a long wedding it might be inconvenient. There are trade offs, the tape videos shoot for one hour, but takes at least that long to down load them into a computer, the mini DVD can be downloaded to the computer in minutes, so I’ve decided to take convenience over the longer play of the tapes.

The bottom line for me the machine is great, once video is shot you finalize it and drop it into a DVD player and you are done. In addition, you can quickly down load the video to your computer and with a little work quickly copy it to a larger DVD. This process is 100X faster then the tape system. This camcorder is for the none technical consumer, if you are interested in tinkering with white balance, shutter speed etc. then this machine won’t be for you, if you want an easy to use camcorder that takes great video then this is your guy.