Sure, it’s an entry-level consumer grade camcorder. There’s no mount for a light, no audio in, no S-VID out, no FireWire, no DV, etc… All features my Cannon ZR60 has.

But the SDR-H40 has a 40GB hard drive (no fussing with tapes!), USB 2.0 interface, can edit clips on the camera, can burn directly to an external DVD burner, holds up to 36hrs (in SP mode) of video on the drive, and has optical image stabilization, which beats the tar out of the electronic stabilization my Cannon ZR60 has.

It has a slightly better image quality than the ZR60 in low-light conditions. In conditions where lighting is good, it’s picture is far more crisp. It’s also nice in that the view-finder is a native 16:9 ratio, so when I’m shooting that aspect, what I’m seeing on the screen isn’t scrunched together. Hurray!

But the big kicker so far is the image stabilization… It ROCKS.

For the down-side, I do have to use the new iMovie to get the clips off the camera. I’m not a fan of the new iMovie, and prefer to use the old iMovie 6. I hate the interface of the new one, and I long to have the sensible, more-traditional interface of a non-linear video editor.

At any rate, this works, the new iMovie isn’t too bad once you figure it out (and as long as you don’t want precision like you could get in iMovie 6) and it has some nice feature

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 9:38 am and is filed under Core Dump. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.