Summary: Good Handycam

Comment: Merits:

1. It's a Sony! (Brand value).
2. Compact and light-weight.
3. Carl Zeiss lens.
4. hard disk memory, easy to transfer to computer.
5. I got the refurbished one from sonystyle.com for 300 bucks. Thats pretty cheap for a 40x zoom HDD camcorder from sony.
6. Motion picture quality is good.

Demerits:
1. Does not have a view finder.
2. The Still picture quality is not that great (As indicated by others too).
3. Does not have a neck strap (Or any provision for that).
4. You need the camcorder dock to charge as well as transfer movies into Computer.
5. The bundled video editor doe not have much functionality. Only you can cut a video, i could not find any option to merge several videos into one.

Overall i like this camcorder, i will buy some video editing software to work on the videos a bit.

Summary: Not Worth It

Comment: I regret buying this camcorder. Video only looks okay when shot outside in the sun. If you shoot video inside, it looks very grainy. Forget about taking pictures with this camcorder since the resolution is so low. The pictures look awful! I'm buying a different one. Don't waste your money!

Summary: Be careful

Comment: It was not as new condition as I expected....since it was told that the item was in the shop for display only.....Since no accessories is provided so please add the price and then think whether it is economical or not?????

Summary: Very Low Quality and Blurry

Comment: Very Low Quality and Blurry. I would compare the quality of this video camera to the standard video camera you get from a cell phone. I am going to try to return this camera.

Summary: SONY DCR-SR42 30GB HDD Handycam Camcorder with 40X Optical Zoom

Comment: I bought this unit relying on the reputation of SONY and never thought SONY could offer such a bad quality video on his handycams. It is awful. It is a real lemon ! I won't recommend to anyone to buy this model. Sorry SONY but you just deceived me !