Sony HDR-TG5V

Miscellaneous Controls (5.50)

Tele Macro

When activated, the camcorder zooms all the way in (10x) and allows you to focus on very close subjects.

Guideframe

Splits the screen into nine equal squares by printing white lines over the image. These lines are meant to assist with framing and will not appear in your final footage.

Conversion Lens

Use this setting when Sony’s 0.7x wide angle conversion lens is connected to the camcorder. According to Sony, Conversion Lens adjusts the stabilization system and focus to work accordingly with the wide angle converter.

Auto Controls (9.55)

Focus – The HDR-TG5V has two manual focus options: regular focus adjustment and spot focus. The regular focus adjustment doesn’t work very well with the camcorder’s touchscreen system. Two buttons are located on either side of the LCD screen and you tap them (or hold them down) to manually focus the image. An icon in the center of the screen does display the focal length,but it does so in meters with about 10 different numeric increments. Using this system, it is very difficult to get a precise focus due to the finicky nature of the touchscreen and the fact that the LCD is cluttered with icons, buttons, and information while you are trying to focus.

Spot Focus, on the other hand, works far better. It allows you to simply tap the portion of the screen you want to bring into focus and the camcorder does the rest. This feature makes very good use of the touchscreen system. The camcorder also has options for Spot Exposure and another setting that does Spot Exposure and Focus at the same time.

Exposure – Exposure is one of the few manual controls that you can actually adjust on the Sony HDR-TG5V. The camcorder offers 28 increments of exposure control, although no numeric values are listed. All adjustments are made using the touchscreen by tapping plus and minus buttons located on the left and right of the LCD. You can also hold down the buttons for quicker adjustment.

It should be obvious that this system does not provide very accurate or precise adjustment because of the lack of any numeric exposure values. On a positive note, 28 increments of exposure adjustment is quite a bit more than we normally see on a camcorder. There’s also a useful Spot Exposure feature that is very similar to the Spot Focus option we discussed in the previous section.

Aperture – There is no manual aperture control on the HDR-TG5V. This is quite a big absence for a camcorder, but it isn’t that surprising—Sony doesn’t even offer aperture control on its high-end consumer camcorders. Full aperture control is available on the Sanyo VPC-HD2000 and the JVC GZ-X900 has an aperture-priority setting.

Shutter Speed – There’s also no way to manually set shutter speed on the HDR-TG5V (again, this feature is absent on all consumer camcorders from Sony). By not including aperture or shutter control, Sony does make its camcorders simpler, but it also severely limits their versatility and diminishes interest amongst experienced videographers. You can still alter the shutter speed on the TG5V by turning on the auto slow shutter feature. This doesn’t allow you to control the shutter, however, but instead enables the camcorder to drop to a 1/30 of a second shutter speed in low light situations. Some of the camcorder’s scene modes also change the shutter speed, but none of them allow you to manually control it.

White Balance – Thank goodness the HDR-TG5V has an option for manual white balance because the camcorder’s white balance presets are severely limited. In addition to the manual option, the TG5V has white balance settings for Outdoor, Indoor, and Auto. Sony’s ‘One-push’ manual white balance feature actually works very well with the camcorder’s touchscreen system. You simply point the camcorder to a white or neutral target and press a button on the LCD. This task is easy to perform and it calibrates the camcorder’s color temperature very well.

Gain – Since the HDR-TG5V doesn’t offer aperture or shutter speed control, we’re not surprised to see it doesn’t include gain adjustment either. Having some sort of gain control has become a more common inclusion on consumer camcorders this year. Panasonic is the only manufacturer to offer complete control, although the aperture has to be open all the way in order to use it. Canon has an AGC limiter feature on the HF S11, HF S10, and HF S100, while JVC offers an AGC on/off setting. Sanyo also includes gain control in the form of ISO settings that work in video mode.

Zoom – Zooming is performed using the circular ring located on the back of the HDR-TG5V. The ring feels a bit awkward because you push it up (clockwise) to zoom out and you push it down (counter-clockwise) to zoom in. Since most zoom toggles are horizontal and pushed side-to-side, this unique circular controller takes some getting used to. One benefit of this design is the fact that you can do everything with your thumb; zooming doesn’t require the use of an index finger like on other camcorders.

There are no secondary zoom buttons on the camcorder’s LCD, which is something that has become a common feature on many camcorders. There are also no zoom speed settings, although the circular ring does allow you to control zoom speed variably by applying more or less pressure on the ring.

The HDR-TG5V is equipped with a 10x optical zoom, which is good for a camcorder of its size. The larger Sony HDR-XR520V only has a slightly longer optical zoom at 12x, and the JVC GZ-X900 only packs in a 5x optical zoom. If you want to increase the zoom using digital magnification, there are options for 20x and 120x on the HDR-TG5V. However, using these digital zooms will result in lower image quality. We recommend sticking with the 10x optical unless you desperately need a close-up.

Audio Controls (1.75)

The Sony HDR-TG5V doesn’t have many audio features, which is one of the big differences between it and the Sanyo VPC-HD2000. The TG5V has a top-mounted microphone that records Dolby Digital 2-channel audio. The mic is positioned so it is out of the way from wandering fingers, but its top-mounting does mean it isn’t directed towards the subjects being recorded. The camcorder has no headphone or external mic jacks—something that the Sanyo VPC-HD2000 includes.

The built-in microphone on the TG5V can be set to Normal or Low recording volume, which is meant to be adjusted if you are shooting in a very loud environment (like a concert hall). The mic can also has a Zoom Mic setting that enables the camcorder to center-in on picking up sound coming from the subject you are zoomed into. The feature uses digital processing to focus the audio recording on the zoomed-in subject, so the resultant audio may not have the best quality. Fortunately, the Zoom Mic feature can be turned on or off.

That’s it for the TG5V’s audio features. The camcorder has no wind cut (or high-pass) filter, nor does it have an accessory shoe or audio level controls. Below is a list of the audio features found on the HDR-TG5V and its comparison models:

Editing (7.00)

The memory card slot on the TG5V is located in the same place as the battery compartment—behind the sliding panel that takes up most of the camcorder’s back side. This panel gives both the battery compartment and the card slot adequate protection and it closes tightly so it won’t accidentally swing open while you are shooting. While Sony confirms that Memory Stick PRO Duo cards up to 16GB in size will work with the HDR-TG5V, only the record times for a 4GB card are listed in the camcorder’s instruction manual. Here is a table of the approximate record times for the camcorder, as provided by Sony: For an overview of the software that ships with this and other camcorders, see our article: Video Editing Software For Your Camcorder.

The HDR-TG5V ships with Picture Motion Browser (PMB) software version 4.2.00. This is the same editing software that comes with most Sony camcorders, so you may be familiar with it if you’ve used Sony products before. The software is a bit complex, but it does have a lot of features. You can upload video to internet sharing sites, burn DVDs, export footage back to a Sony camcorder, perform minor edits to your videos, and organize your clips in a variety of interesting ways. Unfortunately, the software is not compatible with Macs.

The PMB software definitely isn’t the simplest piece of editing software around. It has a confusing layout and some of the advanced features aren’t very intuitive. Also, the software opens up a new window each time you perform a task, which makes the software look more complicated than it needs to be. To Sony’s credit, there are some simple options for creating DVDs and importing footage that automatically appear when you first connect a camcorder to your computer and open the software.

Importing video, which is the most important aspect of any provided video software, is pretty seamless with the PMB software. You can select clips to be imported individually, or you can move everything from your camcorder to computer at once. Once your files are imported, you can view them in calendar mode (by date) or in a number of different ways. The coolest feature is a map view, which shows the location your videos were taken on a map (if they were shot with GPS activated).

Uploading video to YouTube and setting the software up to burn a DVD is also pretty easy with the PMB software. What we didn’t like was the interface for editing your video clips. The system didn’t use the intuitive editing timeline structure that is popular on most non-linear editing systems (like iMovie, Adobe Premiere, and Final Cut). We were also a bit confused by the Movie Tracer feature on the PMB software. Once we used it a couple of times, however, Movie Tracer actually revealed itself to be kind of cool, albeit difficult to use correctly. The feature automatically follows the motion of your camcorder in a selected clip and then pieces together a panoramic set of photographs from the clip. It is designed to turn a sweeping pan from a video into one, large photograph. Like we said, the feature is cool, but most of the time it didn’t produce the results we were looking for.