Camcorder Reviews

Every company wants to get a taste of YouTube’s popularity, and Sony’s no exception. In a jarring change from the company’s Cyber-shot and Handycam lines of digital cameras and camcorders, Sony released the NSC-GC1, a pocket camera/camcorder designed specifically for YouTube and its myriad Web video analogs. At just $200, the GC1 aims squarely at casual users with more interest in style and simplicity than complex photography or video production. As such, Sony clearly designed its black pocketcam for form more than function. Read full Sony NSC-GC1 Review »

Budget camcorders might not seem flashy, but they play an important part in every camcorder line. They’re designed to be an affordable, no-frills product that anyone can pick up for just a few hundred dollars. Since price is their main selling point, however, they tend to lack features that are standard on higher-end models. Among Panasonic camcorders, for example, the PV-GS85 sits as one of the runts of the litter. Still, its 32X optical zoom lens and optical image stabilization make it an interesting runt. Read full Panasonic PV-GS85 Review »

It’s been a longish wait, but Canon will finally premiere its first hard-disk based camcorder this October, the AVCHD-compatible HG10. Based on the innards and lens of the HV20, the HG10 nevertheless uses an almost completely different design, one that takes a few chances–not necessarily successful ones. Read full Canon HG10 Review »

Join me, if you will, along the slow march toward the obsolescence of tape in video. We’ve definitely got a long road ahead of us, but it’s fun to notice how much camcorders have changed already. On the one hand, tapeless camcorders such as Sony’s Handycam HDR-CX7 give product designers the freedom to make smaller, sleeker camcorders. On the other hand, we’ve yet to see a model that records in the AVCHD format, as this one does, match the quality of the footage we’ve seen from tape-based models using the HDV format. However, for an AVCHD camcorder, this does produce very nice video, and will likely blow your socks off if you’re used to a standard-definition camcorder. Read full Sony Handycam HDR-CX7 Review »

Nowhere is the line between still cameras that capture movies and video cameras that take stills fuzzier than in the ambiguous market segment occupied by the Sanyo Xacti VPC-E1. Despite the moniker “digital movie camera” and the nontraditional pistol-grip design, everything about the E1, which includes the ability to shoot 640×480, 30fps movies as well as 6-megapixel still photos, says plain, old camera. Read full Sanyo Xacti VPC-E1 Camcorder Review »