Sony HDR-SR12 First Impressions Camcorder Review by Alfredo Padilla Published on Jan 8, 2008 7:00 PM

Video Performance
The Sony HDR-SR12 (Review, Specs, ) sports a 1/3.15-inch ClearVID CMOS sensor with Sony’s new Exmor technology. Last year’s Sony HDR-SR7 (Specs, Recent News, $1399) had a gross pixel count of 3,200,000 pixels and effective pixel count of 2,280,000. By contrast the Sony HDR-SR12 has a gross pixel count of 5,660,000 pixels and an effective pixel count of 3,810,000 pixels at 16:9 and 2,860,000 pixels at 4:3.

Of course, we don’t have the facilities to perform our usual battery of tests during CES, but we can make some predictions about the performance of the HDR-SR12. Normally, we’d assume that because of the reduced imager size and the increase in pixel density, the noise would increase. However, Sony has made pains to stress that the new Exmor technology on the CMOS chip and the Bionz processing – both borrowed from their Alpha SLR line – will help to contain the noise. We’re not getting our hopes up just because of some fancy, new terminology. At best, we’re hoping that hoping that the noise will only be equal to the noise from last year’s models. If there is, in fact, less noise than previous, we’ll be delighted. If there’s more noise, we’re going to rail against the system (as per usual) that promotes megapixel numbers over image quality.

Low Light Performance
For the same reasons described above, we typically expect low light performance to suffer when imaging chips shrink and pixel density increases. Of course, noise suppression technology also matures a little more every year. This cat and mouse game is cyclical with each new generation of camcorders. We won’t see the real results until we get the HDR-SR12 in our labs, but we tend to err on the side of pessimism. Low light performance, especially in very low light, will probably suffer.