Summary: Edited video quality questionable
Comment: Sony DCR-DVD308 works beautifully and seems well put together. It's light, compact, convenient and generally well designed. Operation is very easy, though it is so light it is very difficult to keep steady on a long zoom, and the zoom is extremely rapid and difficult to make unobtrusive - both probably what you get in this kind of camera. It may be a wonderful camera if you just want to watch what you shot, conveniently immediately, on your living room DVD player. Not so much if you want to edit it for anything other than YouTube. The problem seems to be the specific MPEG-2 compression for mini-dvd storage (which is not limited to Sony). I shot one dvd and then tried to edit it, which was a bit of a nightmare. I did manage to find a converter so I could edit in Adobe Premier Elements but the result was jumpy movement and otherwise pretty inelegant. I had much happier results from my old analog 8mm tape camera and a capture card. I have seen some references to simple editing software supplied, but couldn't find it on either of the cds that came with the camera. Sony's highly rated Vegas suites were not developed by Sony and reviewers say they don't provide any proprietary advantages for editing these miniDVDs. I eventually found an obscure software that will edit in the camera's native format without conversion, and that might work better - for another $100. These are just moving snapshots for me, but if I put a lot of work into editing (and I do want to edit), I want decent results that I won't be embarrassed to share or hate to watch myself. Reviewers (I later read) say the quality of miniDV format is better though tape is less convenient. So I've stepped back a technology, ordered a refurbed Sony DCR-HC62 miniDV, and if it proves better, this one goes on Craig's list.