Small Size, Good Quality
Written: Aug 29 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: size, picture and sound quality
Cons: battery life, flip-out handle
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| steer's Full Review: Sony Handycam DCR-PC5 Mini DV Camcorder |
I used to be very critical to products I use, so take my comments with a grain of salt.
First, it's a great camcorder. Image quality is very good, sound is equally good. I used Sony 8mm camcorder before and it suffered badly from wind noise in microphone. No such problem in PC5, sound is clean, wind noise is suppressed.
Image in bright daylight is virtually flawless. A little bit more color saturation would fit my taste better, but even as is it's pretty good.
At night it's a different story. My old 8mm camcorder used to shot pretty well on average-lit streets. Not PC5. On the other hand, most, if not all, small-lens high-resolution camcorders suffer from this flaw.
A flip-out touch-screen is very convenient. At first I thought the touchscreen buttons are too small for my fingers. But once you press these buttons by your thumb, using other fingers to support the backside of display, all the problems have gone. It's shown in the manual. Now I think it's the best control panel I've seen in camcorders.
Since the camcorder is so small, there is no sufficient place for a good grip on its body. So Sony engineers added a fold-out handle. It takes some time to get used to it. Actually, after a month of use I still feel somewhat uncomfortable with it. I would prefer a more conventional approach.
Talking about features, one thing it sorely lacks is the ability to rewind back the tape in the camera mode. I used this feature a lot in my old camcorder to delete the last recorded scene on spot. In PC5 one has to switch to VCR mode to rewind, and then flip back to camera mode. This is kind of slow.
Also, I would prefer a zoom lever to be just a little less stiff, but this is really not a big deal.
Battery life is not great, something like 25 min with supplied battery. The optional bigger batteries are significantly bulkier. So, I just got a second standard-size battery. With two batteries it's more than sufficient for my use.
I have not use a lot the stills function, so can not comment on this.
All in all, I think it's great camera and would recommend it to anybody.
Size is really, really great, you can take it with you all the time.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
steer
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