Sony Handycam DCR-SR300 (40GB)

Summary: The DCR-SR300 camera has a lot of benefits, but a few drawbacks that I didn't expect. I purchased this camera because of three main features:

1) The 40 GB internal hard disk, and the presumed ease of editing that would come along with it.
2) The native 16:9 standard definition sensor and high image quality.
3) Good low-light performance.

The camera itself is perfectly easy to use, and required no more than 10 minutes or so to find all the settings and adjust them the way I wanted them. It's surprisingly small and lightweight, and totally silent in operation. Ergonomically it's easy to hold and record, although the zoom button is very touchy. The zoom has two modes: slow, and very fast. If you're ok with really fast zooms, this will not bother you, but I find it difficult to produce the very gentle level of force necessary to make it go slowly. A more analog control would have been better, but this is tolerable; plus, you can work around it by using the always-slow zoom controls next to the LCD display.

The picture quality is quite good, and I love the native wide-screen sensor. The low light performance is about what I expected, although in Nightshot mode, it sometimes loses autofocus and wanders around for a while trying to find the subject. This is an all automated use camera -- it does have some manual controls, but they are buried away under the touch screen menu, so aren't much value in real time. The camera does use interlaced images, of which I am no fan. Although for anything in the consumer price range, this seems to be on par.

One feature Sony touts on this camera is their "smooth slow recording" which takes 3 seconds of video, and stretches it to 12 seconds for a slow effect. It does record slow and smooth, but what they don't tell you is that it degrades the picture quality while it does it. It's still an interesting feature that has its uses, but it does not perform at full quality. For most purposes, I expect slow motion is better done in post production to maintain image quality.

Audio quality is good for the person using the camera to narrate, but the mic is unidirectional, and there is no jack to add an external (non Sony proprietary) microphone. The microphone points up from the top of the camera, so it picks up a lot of ambient noise, and not a lot of the subject. A simple mic input jack would make all the difference here, but unfortunately there is none. Again, in its price range, I don't think this is so unusual or bad, just less than what I hoped for.

The internal hard disk is really quite cool. Even set to the highest quality mode, it holds something like 10 hours of data -- way more than I would ever need for a single project. Moving the files to a computer is no trouble at all: just plug the camera into the included dock, attach USB cable from the dock to your computer. The camera shows up just like any other hard disk. But once you have the files transferred is where the pain starts for Mac users.

The DCR-SR300 uses MPEG2 compression (I learned in the course of troubleshooting), which is not natively supported on Mac OSX. Apple is kind enough to sell an MPEG2 decoder on their website for $20 which allows you to see the video, but unfortunately not hear the audio as well. I dug around the net and found a decent and free tool to help with this called Streamclip, and it seems to be the only workaround for this problem. Streamclip allows you to convert the MPEG2 files into an MPEG4 file that iMovie can understand, as well as deinterlace, etc. It's not a terrible solution -- it's actually pretty good, but it's far from the ease of use that I was hoping for.

Overall I'm happy with the camera -- particularly the image quality, but was displeased with the difficulty converting the file format to something the Mac would understand. The Sony manual was no help whatsoever here, but luckily there was a solution that ended up being acceptable.