in the eighties consumer video camcorders were held on your shoulder and in the nineties held on one hand as if a telescope . made possible with the story of the incredible shrinking video cassette tape . ofcourse the one nemesis in electronics is the machine which has many moving parts which is more prone to break & tear .

 

then in September 2003 Panasonic came out with a product that broke the workings of a conventional camcorder : D-Snap AV10 a light tape-less wonder recording on SD memory cards, held like a pistol . the next month Sanyo came out with a similar model easier to grasp in Xacti DMX-C1 with better motion correction, and has been improving its video AND photo quality in this gun-held domain . all this while Sony has been introducing digital recording on conventional tapes then mini CDRs and hard-disk recordings, thus limiting its still-bulky size .

now finally Sony introduces such a model in HD1 made of Titanium casing . it is a joy upgrading from former hard-disk based models for a vast improvement in portability . just looking at the specs one would wonder how much recording can go into a tight memory card but it is only when you begin to use hard-disks that with the advent of current encoding technology you seldom use a good part of that 40GB space such as in Sony SR300 .

 

still as smaller than any of their former camcorders HD1 feels compact and robust, while Sanyo Xacti’s were almost feather-light like a toy . however you are first struck by its high price tag as opposed to Sanyo and then wish if the photo mode could have been crisper also if there was a external microphone jack . so in the end you give a bit of video and quite a quality in still photo for a device you can carry around in your pocket .

  • 1/5 CMOS image sensor
  • 4 MegaPixel resolution
  • 10x optical zoom
  • 1920 x 1080 full-HD video resolution
  • media : Memory Stick & Pro (8GB records 55 minutes to 5:25 hours)
  • 2.7″ TFT colour LCD touchscreen
  • face detection
  • Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround built-in zoom microphone
  • L63 x H119 x W32 mm 240g with basic battery