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The Handycam HDR-CX100 is the first of Sony’s AVCHD models to head down the budget trail.

And with it comes the inevitable query : what quantity of a sacrifice in video quality and usability are you willing to make for size and price? But although it’s pretty enough to have a look at, we found the CX100 a bit uncomfortable to shoot with.

Unlike its older, more costly sibling, the CX12, the top is comparatively flat, which makes it hard to grip whilst handling the zoom switch and photo buttons ; you must truly squeeze with your back fingers to keep the video recorder from moving. Shooting stills required 2 hands : one to carry the video recorder and the other to press the shutter.

Though the touch-sensitive screen is for the main part adequately responsive, the menus are structured in such a fashion that it’s virtually impossible to recollect where to find some of the settings. Under the Home menu you can select from the 3 basic capture modes–movie, photograph, and Smooth Slow Record ( as an example, to record golfing swings ) –though the mode switch permits you to select between film and photograph.

Under this menu is also a tab for image-viewing options ; Others, which are random options for in-camera modifying, and Television and USB connections ; Manage Media, which is where you select whether to record to the internal 8GB of memory or to a card ; and Settings for options like Steady-Shot stabilization, choosing high def or standard def, face detection and Grin Shutter, and Output settings ( as an example, Television type and HDMI resolution ).

So whilst you select Picture Settings in one spot on the Home menu, and standard vs high def somewhere else on the Home menu, you select film quality in the Options menu. At its highest quality, the 16-megabit-per-second mode, you can record virtually seven mins of video per gb. of storage.

That is about fifty five minutes in the internal memory. If you drop to 9-megabit-per-second mode, that increases to about ten minutes per gigabyte. With the exception of the face detection, Smile Shutter, and scene modes, the MPEG recorder has no bells or whistles to speak of. That’s not really a bad thing, but it might employ a wind filter. The company dropped the Night-Shot infrared mode for this model ;we don’t believe it was awfully favored, but we found it helpful in emergencies. It forgoes Sony’s common 5.1-channel surround in favor of more everyday 2-channel–no great loss there.

The CX100 incorporates Sony’s 0.20 -inch 2.4-megapixel Exmor ClearVid sensor, and the quality sensor actually shows in the low-light shooting ; though you would not like the results from your recent bar crawl, video shot in your living room should look quite good thanks to the on-chip noise reduction. In alternative ways the video quality is classic of a lower-cost model. In bright daylight there are often blown-out highlights, colours are enticing and saturated but some–like deep red roses–are off.

The image stabilization works nicely together with the moderately long 10x zoom lens. The lens focuses pretty quickly, but it might truly use some better coatings ; it displays significant lens flare from bright light coming in at oblique angles.

Given the widespread availability of better but larger older models from Sony and other makers whose costs have dropped seriously, the genuine purchasing call you make with the Sony Handycam HDR-CX100 is how much size matters to you. And even if you would like it as little as practical, you need to possibly check out rivals like the Canon Vixia HF100 before committing.

Conclusion: You can tell where Sony took a short cut on this compact, flash-based HD video recorder. Even though it’s decent, there are better options for the money than the Sony Handycam HDR-CX100. Sony’s first try to produce an HD video recorder for under $600 is a touch of a mixed bag. Like all its rivals, the Corporation has driven its flash and hard-disk HD development in 2 directions : one road leads to compact and less robust models, the other to bigger but better supplied products.