Pocket HD camcorders

Lori Grunin
Senior editor June 1, 2010 (updated on: September 20, 2010)

One price class up from their dirt-cheap siblings, these mini camcorders basically do the same thing--quickly shoot and upload your life's most embarrassing, amusing, or engaging moments--except in HD. Like their kin, the software necessary for playback and upload comes loaded on the devices so that you can share your masterpieces from any machine, though they don't all operate so ideally on Macs.

Their advantage lies in the compact designs, ease of use, and low, low prices. Though some come in full HD 1,920x1,080-pixel models, playing and editing that high-resolution video takes knowledge and horsepower that's at odds with the simplicity and affordability of these camcorders. Furthermore, there's a lot more to HD video than simply resolution; decent HD video requires much better lenses than these little guys can incorporate, more sophisticated image-processing capabilities than their low-power chips can support, and bigger sensors than they can fit. They also face competition from digital still cameras that capture solid-but-more-upload-friendly 1,280x720-pixel-resolution video, with the bonus of zoom lenses.