Sony HDR-SR12 First Impressions Camcorder Review

Compression
The Sony HDR-SR12 (Review, Specs, ) captures video in the AVCHD format, which is now in its third generation on consumer camcorders. With this year's models, including the Sony HDR-SR12, Sony has upped the quality of video to a full 1920 x 1080 with a new maximum bitrate of 16 Mbps. Other compression options remain the same: HQ at 9Mbps, SP at 7Mbps and LP at 5Mbps, all of which capture at the older standard of 1440 x 1080. The Sony HDR-SR12 can also record in standard definition.

Recording in full 1920 x 1080 is the new standard, and has been adopted by most of the major manufacturers this year for AVCHD camcorders. Canon incrementally tops out Sony with a max bit rate of 17Mbps with their solid state FS10 camcorder. Any increase in bit rate should work to alleviate the problems we’ve seen with AVCHD in the past, including trailing and artifacting. All manufacturers still have a long way to go until they can hit the maximum possible 24Mbps rate spec’d for AVCHD. We’re anxious to get this camcorder into the lab for a full round of testing.

Media
The Sony HDR-SR12 is a hard drive based camcorder and is Sony's top of the line hard drive model with 120GB of storage, twice the storage of last year's largest hard drive model. If you like the looks of the SR12, but want to scale back on your spending, the SR11 (Specs, ) is identical in all regards but the capacity, which is reduced to 60GB. Hard drive camcorders make it very easy to transfer files between your camcorder and PC, simply connect them and drag the files over.

You can also record video to a MemoryStick Duo/PRO Duo card, an excellent feature that provides you with a lot of flexibility. If you happen to use up all 120GB of built in memory you can probably pop into any camera store in the world to find a MemoryStick for continued recording. This is a nice upgrade over last year’s models that only allowed you to record to the internal hard drive.

You can record 14 hours 50 minutes at the highest FH quality setting. At HQ you can record 29 hours 40 minutes, an even 36 hours at SP and 48 hours at LP. In standard definition you can get 29 hours 40 minutes at HQ, 44 hours at SP and 84 hours at LP.

Editing
When we reviewed AVCHD camcorders last year we were concerned about the rather limited range of software editing options, but as the format has rapidly gained popularity editing options have also grown. Sony Vegas 8.0, Ulead Video Studio 11, and Pinnacle Studio 11 support AVCHD. Mac users have support for AVCHD out of the box as the new iMovie ‘08 supports the format and Apple has also added AVCHD support to Final Cut Express 4. The Sony HDR-SR12 ships with Picture Motion Browser 2.0, a very simple video editor that won't get you very far. Before you purchase software, be sure to research that it will accommodate the camcorder brand. Though AVCHD is shared between Sony, Panasonic, Canon, and others, each tweaks the codec just enough to ensure incompatibility with something you own.