Sony HDR-UX20 First Impressions Camcorder Reviewby Alfredo PadillaPublished on Jan 10, 2008 3:35 PM 
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Compression
Like most of Sony's camcorder lineup this year, the Sony HDR-UX20 (Review, Specs, Recent News, ) captures video in AVCHD compression. As a step up from last year's models the Sony HDR-UX20 captures in full 1920 x 1080 rather than 1440 x 1080. The Sony HDR-UX20 allows you to record in HD FH at 16Mbps, which is a significant bump from last year’s top bitrate of 12Mbps. Other options are HD HQ at 9Mbps, HD SP at 7Mbps and HD LP at 5Mbps. 1920 x 1280 recording is only available at the top quality setting of HD FH. You 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. Once concern with DVD camcorders is that the limitations imposed by a physically spinning media are – for the time being – a hard ceiling on the total bitrate. This means you won’t be able to record at the highest quality setting to DVD media on the Sony HDR-UX20. Instead you’ll have to step down to the next quality setting. This means the 8GB of internal storage and a MemoryStick Duo/PRO Duo cards you are recording onto will be quickly filled up with the highest bitrate video. Any increase in bit rate should work to alleviate the problems we’ve seen with AVCHD in the past, including trailing and artifacting.
Media
The Sony HDR-SR12 (Review, Specs, ) is compatible with DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD+RW and DVD+R DL (Dual Layer) discs. New in this year's models is the ability to record video to a MemoryStick and 8GB of internal memory, which Sony calls Hybrid Plus. The ability to record video to a memory card or internal memory does address one major issue with DVD camcorders: the limited recording times that come with DVD media. Having this kind of flexibility will be a boon to those who don't have enough DVDs with them or don't want to wait to record again while a DVD finalizes. Depending on how much footage you’ve recorded and the capacity of the DVD, finalization can take a very long time.
Probably the biggest issue with high definition DVD recording is that you lose much of the convenience that normally comes with DVD camcorders if you record high definition video. You will need to either play back the DVD on your computer using a special driver, buy a Blu-Ray player to play it back on your TV or simply connect the camcorder to your TV and use it as the playback device, which any camcorder can do. The ability to record onto a MemoryStick obviates this issue somewhat, but then you have to ask yourself if you're not better off going with a MemoryStick only device like the Sony HDR-CX7 (Review, Specs, Recent News, ) (Review, Specs, Recent News, $882.95) or a hard drive device like the Sony HDR-SR12. Or you can forget about HD altogether and go with one of Sony's standard definition DVD camcorders.
Editing
Thankfully support for AVCHD editing has improved significantly since we looked at the Sony HDR-UX7 (Review, Specs, $0.00) last year. You now have Sony Vegas 8.0, Ulead Video Studio 11, and Pinnacle Studio 11 to choose from. 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. You will want to check to make sure that the software you purchase is specifically compatible with Sony's AVCHD camcorders. Although AVCHD is a standard there's just enough of a difference between the codec used by each manufacturer to create potential problems. The Sony HDR-UX20 ships with the very basic Picture Motion Browser ver. 2.0, which will allow you to import your videos and burn them to DVD, but not much else.