Sony Handycam DCR-SR62

I bought this camera for mother’s day for my wife. I figured I would save some time skipping the whole process of converting to mpeg-2 and got a better video quality at the same time, as this is 1 megapixel and my current Hi-8 is only 0.3. I was so wrong!!!
This camera is a completely waste of money.
Video quality was so bad that I started blaming myself for not reading the instructions. I started playing with the different video settings. The ‘twilight’ helps indoors but you can notice a lot of background noise, and the focus starts behaving very awkward: slow to focus and losing the focus even while positioned at the same subject. Colors are on the dark side, sharp image, but not very bright. The ‘sports’ mode doesn’t have the focus problem, but you need a lot of light to use it, forget about using it indoors. You cannot walk from a lighted area to a less lighted area and expect a smooth transition and auto adjustment, it’s not gonna happen, you will need to use the menus while walking. Struggling with the colors problem I tried the ‘auto’ and ‘one-push’ white balance, the latter helped a little bit, but still not good. I shoot comparison footage of my old Hi-8 and the SR62 in the same place under the same conditions and old horse still behave better in low light, with less video noise and with better colors. I wish the guys at camcorderinfo.com had a review of this camera, but they don’t. I wouldn’t have wasted my money.
Yes, you can transfer mpeg-2s directly to your computer and burn a DVD in seconds, but that’s it.
I returned it to the store.

My father bought this for me 2 years ago and the first couple months it ran smooth and the only problem was the editing, and dock (USB only).
However during summer break when i took it to camp many times it would go completely off-focus resulting in poor video. It didn't help if I used the tri-pod or not it would just go off-focus randomly.
the night vision merely lets you see rather little even with a lot of lights.

However as the experience was not all bad, the only thing this video camera was good good at was taking still pictures.