Sony Handycam HDR-CX160 (Black)

Pros: Wide angle coverage, zoom, recording quality in normal light, battery life

Cons: Not so good recording in low light, bad in sunlight

Summary: Bought this due to low price for product features and believing in Sony's old reputation. I was particularly looking for OIS and low light recodring quality. Very much impressed with the wide angle coverage in mountain and other scenic areas. High zoom recording quality is good but it is very hard to keep it stable - you need a tripod or some support to enjoy high zoom recording. Playback quality through A/V cord is excellent when recorded in normal light. Battery appeared to last for ever during recording.

I find low light recording is not as nice as I expected after reading several reviews before buying the camcorder. It looks more like looking at the the scene through a white screen. But acceptable considering that competing products at the comparable price may not offer better choice. Not sure if the camcorder has an option to disable low light shooting. If yes, I will try it. Recording quality in sunlight is really bad. Parts of the scene exposed to sunlight are bright white and lots of details are lost, whereas it doesn't appear so to normal eyes.

Further during playback, the scenes, and even worse only parts of some scenes become suddenly bright or dark even if actual lighting didn't change during recording. This is very annoying.
Probably camcorder is trying too much auto correction during recording which is actually messing up with the natural looks.

For some reasons, after transferring the recording to laptop, playback on laptop has more flickers than when playing back on HD TV through A/V cable. Probably I need to pay for a better software to transfer the video to laptop/DVDs.

I wish I find some yet unexplored features on the camcorder which avoids unnecessary digital corrections like in low light and sun light, or I find another software to undo the unwanted corrections.

Overall, the camcorder provides good features and value for the price with some drawbacks. It depends on your preferences whether to go for this. I will definitely explore other products next time, though may finally end up with this camcorder (I know there will be a different line of products in future, but I am talking in equivalent terms).