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- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 16 reviews Back to product review
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10 out of 10 people found this review helpful
3.5 stars
"Very good video quality, lightweight and compact camcorder"
Pros: Video quality, compact size, decent battery life
Cons: Very sensitive zoom button, indecisive auto focusing in low light conditions
Summary: Very good camcorder for amateurs interested in shooting high quality video using the default settings of the camcorder. The audio and video quality of this camcorder stands out, offering balanced colour rendering, vivid colours, very good detail in a wide range of lighting conditions and good capturing of sounds both indoors and outdoors. The video quality remained very good even in cases of abrupt light transitions (e.g. shooting from outdoor to indoor) but showed some "noise" under poorly lit conditions (e.g. shady indoors with indirect light at dawn). The HC96 exports .avi video files that do not require decompression for editing. The results I got after editing a 30-minute footage with Pinnacle Studio, adding transitions and other digital effects were very satisfactory.
On the other hand, the HC96 seemed slow or indecisive in auto focusing under low lighting (i.e. indoors in late afternoon light) and in some cases when panning quickly across objects lying in varying distances from the camcorder.
Also, you may need some practice before managing to control the zoom button well, as it is very sensitive and tends to zoom rather fast. The touch-screen menus are functional once you familiarize yourself with the menu tree or decide to customize the menus to your preference. Battery life with the supplied battery (NP-FP50)is decent and lasts just over an hour (65 min) if shooting using only the viewfinder.
Although this camcorder is less noisy that previous high-end Sony camcorders (PC-350 or PC-1000), the motor noise is still present as a medium-pitch hum. However, I did not notice his noise to be captured by the microphone.
The quality of still pictures is agreeable, but I would think of still pictures as a secondary feature of a camcorder, that should be judged primarily by the quality of its video performance.
