Sony Handycam HDR-XR520V

This platform has a good potential but unfortunately somethings are missing: - it's a 1080i camcorder and for this price it should be 1080p; - memory card recording time is not fast enough for consecutive… shots on camera mode, for fast scenes you must save pictures on hard drive; - Sony goes with Memory Stick for photos, not very portable to pc and laptops outside Sony's word; - Sony Lens are good but this project should has Carl Zeiss Lens; - If you add an additional lens or filter the internal flash will not work and if you have something attached to the HS you will not be able to use an external flash; - it just offer you 12x optic zoom. There are good thing on this platform too: - you can easily find additional lens, IR lights, spear battery, battery charge and microphone to use on it; - it's easy to use and shot pictures; - Face and smile recognitions works good; - it has good internal microphone; - fast zoom in and out; - the GPS is a plus on this Camcorder.

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Pity the lefties, for this camera fits my right hand perfectly with all the controls in easily-learnable positions. Capacious hard drive does away with worries about storage on a 25-day vacation trip like… my recent one. Tip for new users: Learn early how to use the control that lets you set exposure and focus. You'll need it when you're zooming or panning in a varied-lighting situation. A wide-angle adapter is a good first-accessory-purchase, though my supplier sent me the wrong one and I longed for the right one throughout my trip. Stunning video that checks out beautifully on a 46" monitor, stunning stills that can be taken while shooting video (or independent of video) and, so far, the sound seems fine, though I haven't checked that thoroughly at this writing. Anybody want to volunteer to edit 25 days of Norway?

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This is my 3rd Sony camcorder over the past 11 years. My first was the TRV-310 which used Digital 8 tapes and at the time was the high end for consumer camcorders. We used it for travels all over the… world and were very pleased with the quality. It was especially good in low light, which tends to be where we used it most (indoors in regular incandescent light, which I would guess would be 75% of the total recording). We had our first child and upgraded to the DCR-HC85 mini DV camcorder and again were very pleased. We shot over 70 hours of tape and over Christmas converted all the tapes to a hard drive through a 3rd party company (who has time to convert tapes at a 1:1 ratio plus setup time?) because were were tired of creating long index pages for each tape and then digging though them to find the small section we wanted (1 terabyte drive to hold it all!). The only issue I had was that as comcorders started moving to digital, the low light quality got worse. This one was frustrating indoors with shadows, backlit settings created dark, grainy videos, etc. About 2 weeks ago, I decided it was time to bit the bullet and buy the XR520V. I am absolutely impressed. I was very skeptical about the low light specs on the Sony site (11 lux vs. 4 lux I had on the TRV310 and 8 lux on the HC85). I guess because of the larger CMOS sensor,the higher resolution and going back to an optical lens, the low light is excellent. Perfect for indoor use even in pretty low light (finally!). The one feature I like the most is the index of each section of video recorded. If you are like me, you have hundreds of 30 second to 2 minute clips which were impossible to index on a tape. This indexes by date, so you can scroll through the dates and see thumbnails of each clip. This is so much better than fast forwarding through a tape (if you can call it FF!). Again, hooray! Pros: *Great low light *Outstanding video quality *Instant on by just opening the LCD screen *Index thumbnails grouped by date (even my kids like this since they can pick out their favorites instantly!) *Much better controls on the camera (record, zoom are also on the LCD screen, so big fingers don't have to squeeze into the hand strap and then find the zoom) *Nice optical stabilization and zoom (be warned that in full HD mode, it will track every shake and although not jittery, it is noticable). Zoom is very smooth and doesn't "jerk" like older models if you moved it too fast. *Touchscreen menus are much better than previous models *37mm filter diameter, so I can keep most of my lenses from the last 2 camcorders (again, keep in mind that with HD, you will need to upgrade wide angle or zoom lenses due to resolution, but UV should be fine). *Nice, compact size. I'm not carrying a large bag with me everywhere we go. Cons: *You should budget spending at least another $300-400 for accessories. The included battery is functional, but you may get caught short on a long trip without some way to keep it charged in the car. You will also need software to be able to convert the video to HD due to the AVCHD compression (Sony Vegas seems to be the best for this at about $80 on Amazon); a good UV filter to protect the lens; HDMI cable; new case (as I would lose this camcorder in my current case for the HC85) and a 1TB hard drive to save video (to start!). Blu-Ray will be a much later purchase for us. *No HDMI cable included. *Using the HDMI cable, it appears the camcorder will only output a 1080i signal max. Not sure I understand that one, but in the setup of the camera, it doesn't give an option for 1080p output throught HDMI. What gives? *GPS is nice, but I have to go outside to get a satellite to get my location. I think it will be a novelty for me as I get tired of doing this and just quit bothering. Maybe if I am on family vacation somewhere and I want to tag it, otherwise, I will spend a lot of time chasing satellites. I have to say overall, I will thoroughly enjoy this camcorder. We have 2 kids 4 and 2 and this is so much easier to use and carry around than our older model. I also like the quick on, so we don't miss their spontaneous sing alongs. It is also nice to take videos over a weekend trip and then just plug it into the TV, go to the index and pick out what we want to watch. Instant gratification! No more finding a tape and going back and forth to find the scenes we want (plus the previous camcorders FF is about 2X FF max). I only got the 520V over the 500V for the extra drive space. Normally, I never try to max out a drive or flash card in a camera to avoid loss of data. I regularly copy over from my camera and never max out the flash card, so I imagine I will do the same here, but with no option to get an extra tape when I need it, it was worth the $200 for the extra space. I would never want to get caught short here! 4 stars only due to price and "forced" cost of needed accessories. Enjoy!

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I've been Sony cameras user since about 30 years, so I'm very used with a great number of models and its evolution. This camera really is better than any previous handy cameras a clear improvement not any… doubt about it. 1.- Great image quality as expected on a 1920x1080 pixels. 2.- Better low light sensitivity so better shots on it. 3.- And as I can say the most important improvement it is the Image stabilizer (Steady Shot), it is optical and has a remarkable better and with smoother results on the image stabilization, this is a very important issue for me. specialy for pans and zooms without tripode. So the "Active Mode" it is a true improvement, congratulations to sony engineers. 4.- Good menu navigation. It has more and needed choices than a tape recorder. 5.- Great HDD capacity, just for any one and I set the best Quality Picture. 6.- Very Good photo pictures, and is a very good and useful the function for getting still pictures from the video shots, you can choose any frame and convert it in a photo picture, with 2.1 pixels resolution, good enough for me. 7- The only thing because I take out one star, is that you have 240GB. but you can shot up to 3.999 scenes, that means same number of shots befor you transfer your video, this means for me: If I'm on a trip and I use to shot 300 scenes in a day of use, I have only 11 days before the need of transfering it to my computer. So a solution is to get a mamory card for save some video and make room for more, no matter how much hard disk space remains to you. 8.-And very useful too is the reaction time to get ready for recording, when you open the LCD Screen or the view-finder it power-on or start automaticaly and fast. 9.- The X.V Color (Sony) excelent too. For editing, I use computer sofware Adobe Premier CS3, not the camera's options. So highly recomended.

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