Summary: Low resolution and poor quality

Comment: I bought it new in 2002 for $400. The color is pretty good. The resolution is very poor, only close shot get you satified. Other than that you get blur edge and barrel distortion sometimes. I didn't use it a lot for the first 3 years, only the last 2 years I used it regularly to tape my daughter's piano class homework every 2 weeks for 5-8 minutes each time. Recently I have to knock this camera extremly hard several times to make the recording start (It's common issue as the piano teacher told me.). So I have to find a new camcorder now. I don't know what can I do if it refuses to work one day in my daughter's piano class.

Summary: loved it when it worked... get an ext. warranty on this one

Comment: I've had two of these, and both of them lasted about a year? Both of them had the same malfunction- tapes jamming in the camera. I talked to a repair shop & they see this a lot with sonys because of the design. Using purchased movie software we were able to make good movies in our pc & burn to dvd. Using pixela software included we could capture still shots (good enough for listing things on ebay, etc.) which was a novelty then!

Summary: Poor support

Comment: I've had the camcorder for a while now, and was hoping to be able to use the USB streaming feature to make small computer movies and send them to my friends and family overseas. Although the camcorder is good the included software is weak and the USB streaming makes a very choppy poor quality AVI file. I recently got a new computer and could not find the device driver disk that came with the camcorder. Sony technical support was a joke and they ended up trying to sell me a driver for my camcorder. So now I have a camcorder that I can plug into my TV or record onto a VHS (Do people still use VHS?) but any dreams I have of putting something on my computer are fading fast. I'm going to have to find a new way to send my parents the video I took of my new house.

Frankly in this day and age an analogue camcorder is a waste of money.

Summary: Ignore the USB Streaming

Comment: While this is a decent Analog camcorder, don't expect much from the USB streaming feature. The maximum frame size over USB is 320x240, which is half the minimum recommended for creating a DVD out of a home movie. If you want to get the video from your tapes onto a computer or DVD, expect to purchase a separate video capture device or card.

To make matters worse, the bundled software doesn't let you capture more than thirteen minutes of video at a time before it crashes and claims the drive is out of disk space, regardless of how much disk space you really have avaliable. This happens even when recording to NTFS volumes, which do not have the 4 gig file size limit of Fat32.

Most third party programs will also have issues using the camcorder's USB streaming features. The drivers create an eclectic audio device that many video capture programs can't see, so you'll have to use a separate audio cable unless you like the idea of not having any sound. Roxio's products are among the many that can't use the audio driver.

In short, it's a decent camcorder, assuming you compare it to other devices as though the USB streaming feature didn't exist, because for all practical purposes, it doesn't.

Summary: Great camera, but missing important feature

Comment: This is a great camera. We use it a lot. I love the night shot, the steady shot works great and it has a lot of other nice features. Everything on it works great all the time. The light metering and auto focus work very well too.

There is only one problem that really frustrates me. It has a right and a left microphone and records in stereo, but there is no way to get stereo playback through the analog A/V output. That's certainly one of the cheapest things I've seen in products that I've bought. It's very disapointing from a name like Sony.