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Although broadcast High Definition Television still seems to be a few months away, that is no reason not to have your Christmas celebrations in High Definition.
As reported over the summer, Sony have released the £1,500 Handycam HDR-HC1E (street price £1,300), a delightful little camera which I have been playing for the past week or so. This review isn’t going into the technical wonders that allow you to record 1440x1080 onto the same DV tapes that you find in most camcorders these days, nor worry that 1440x1080 isn’t the full 1920x1080 of professional cameras - I am told that many pro cameras are only 1440x1080 as well - but will look at the process of using it in every day use.
My review unit arrived without a manual but the camera is very easy to use and set up – all the complicated options that you can configure are set on a touch screen-based menu system and other than a few technical queries I didn’t worry about the missing manual at all. I have had a DV camcorder for a number of years and one of the things that annoyed me was the fact that you had to carry around a separate charger base unit to charge the batteries – the more professional of you would consider this a benefit – but for the HC1E you just plug the charger into the camera and the battery is recharged. A painless process and one less thing to pack on one's travels.
Timing is everything and I was lucky enough to borrow the review unit over half term and pop off to the in-laws with an excuse to bring out the camera at every opportunity. One of the things that you soon get used to is how easy the camera is to use as a simple 'point and shoot' Handycam. I liked the fact that it starts up quickly and that you can steady the camera with your left hand holding the widescreen LCD display while using the left hand to start and stop recording along with controlling the zoom on the side of the screen. This seemed to make for a very stable two handed position to hold the camera. The LCD screen is very bright and even in bright sunshine looking at the screen was fine and there was never a feeling that using the viewfinder would be better.
Taking the camera around was easy and although not truly pocket sized, it did fit into a big overcoat pocket and was happily carried around on my journeys. The camera never felt too bulky or out of place and I didn’t feel silly pulling the camera out (the HC1E looks like hundreds of other camcorders out there). So overall the camera can’t be faulted in its performance for a consumer.
So after recording quite a lot of material what do you do next?
The big problem, some would say, at the moment is that there are no HD consumer storage devices on the market, so you can’t record or burn a next generation DVD as HD DVD and Blu-Ray are still a little while away. But there are still options. The first option is to play back direct from the camera; this requires connecting your camera using the supplied component cable and the audio from the composite cable but, as most HD TVs seem to only have component inputs on the rear of the screens or media boxes, this could be a pain to plug and unplug if you want to show pictures round at a friend's. But that is a minor thing, how do the pictures look you ask? Well, pretty amazing: you get a widescreen image with excellent colour and resolution and although if you have a big plasma/LCD it may not appear much better than a good DVD, you did shoot the material yourself on a kit that cost under £1,500.
So you have played back the images on the camera direct to your TV and you are impressed. What else can you do? Well Sony doesn’t provide any software with the HC1E and I was a little worried about what software to use on the PC until I got an email from Ulead about VideoStudio 9 (£49.99) having a free HDV plug-in. I happened to already have this product and got the plug-in and set about uploading the tape to my PC. I do recommend a fast PC for this but if you have a powerful enough PC then the process is very straightforward. The Ulead plug-in doesn’t allow splitting the file you create, while it is played in as you can do with DV, but it happily pulled in 40 minutes of HDV video and found the scene changes with the scene tool. There didn’t seem to be a problem that 40 minutes of HDV (or for that matter DV) is 7Gb in size and the program created a standard MPEG-2 file as part of the process.
You can then happily edit as you would anything else in VideoStudio 9 and once completed can finalise and create a new MPEG-2 HD file. All very seamless and remarkably painless. In fact there are links at the bottom of this review to a 1 minute selection of images that I took. There are 3 files: the MPEG-2 one at 175Mb (1440x1080/25) and the DivX one at 28Mb (1280x720/25) and a DiviX encoded PAL version 10Mb (720x400/25).
Conclusion
It is very easy to recommend this camera. If you are old enough to remember the change from camcorders with Compact VHS to DV there was a huge gain in quality and if you have both DV and S-VHS material you look back on the old material and its rather quaint fuzzy nature. Well in another 10 years we will all be doing the same when comparing DV to HD images – though who knows if the format will be the same. People ask why they should get HD now when there are no HD broadcasts in the UK and no permanent storage for output in the way of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (which are probably still a year away). Well firstly when Compact S-VHS and DV first came out there were no recordable DVDs (in fact there were no DVDs) so you ended up editing back to tape. In reality when both of these formats started there weren’t even computers to do the editing. So this is not a new situation and hardly one to really worry about, especially now as external firewire hard disks are relatively cheap and give an excellent source of external removable storage.
More importantly camcorders are about catching moments; your kids grow up they take their first steps only once and their first solo bicycle ride without stabilisers once. Do you want it in fuzzy standard definition or new widescreen high definition so that when you want to embarrass them to their girlfriends/boyfriends in 10-20 years time it doesn’t look like the equivalent of the Super 8 movies that your parents or grandparents might have had and got out to wind you up.
Up until this point HD was out of the reach of the average person; the cameras looked big and bulky and you wouldn’t want to be seen at the school play with one for fear of being considered too much of a nerd. On the other hand the Sony HDC1E looks like many other camcorders - it might be slightly bigger than many of the smallest of the current models but it is similar in size and weight to many DV camcorders in past model ranges and looks quite at home in the home.
That said, the picture quality is not perfect and fast panning with strong vertical lines does result in a noticeable MPEG artefacts. Also, it should be noted that low light performance is not good as some of the leading DV camcorders but these issues are a small price to pay for super true widescreen images that, in comparison to DV camcorders, have much greater resolution and extremely good colour balance.
After playing with this last week and showing the results to my wife (who also had a go at filming stuff and was very happy with the camera), she was very impressed and wanted to know if this was what I wanted for Christmas.
Do I have to wait that long?
Downloads
There is one 1-minute film available in 3 formats; as you can see the full HD file is 175Mb but I have also included 2 DivX compressed versions - one at HD resolution (28Mb) and one just below PAL resolution (8Mb):
1 minute, 1440x1280/25 MPEG HD file (175Mb) Click here
1 minute, 1280x720/25 DivX HD file (28Mb) Click here
1 minute, 640x368/25 DivX HD file (8Mb) Click here
Other images of the camera image 1 and image 2.
Links
Sony HDV HRC1E: More information from the Sony site.
Ulead Video Studio 9: More information from the Ulead UK Site.
DivX information from the DivX site
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