Camcorder News

Among the Sony camcorder announcements today, Sony also provided more details on the new line of Sony DVD camcorders which were originally announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January. The Sony DCR-DVD100, DCR-DVD200 and DCR-DVD300 will apparently be available in October. The new camcorders can record on both DVD-R and DVD-RW discs.

The entry model is the DCR-DVD100 with a price of $900. The DCR-DVD100 includes a 1/4 in. 680K pixel CCD with 380K effective pixels for video and an imaging system that Sony says is similar to the DCR-TRV19, hopefully this means that we'll get similar quality low light performance. The DCR-DVD100 can record 640 x 480 pixel resolution stills. The DCR-DVD100 includes a 2.5 in. LCD screen which is not touch panel. None of the DVD camcorders include touch panel screens. The camcorder includes a 10x optical zoom and a 120x digital zoom. Video is transferred to the computer using the USB 2.0 interface, and the camcorder does not include a Firewire port. The camcorders include microphone jacks, s-video jacks and RCA in / out jacks however they do not include headphone jacks.

The $1,000 DCR-DVD200 is the step-up model from the DCR-DVD100 and it includes all the features of the DCR-DVD100 however it includes a 1/4.7 in. 1 Megapixel CCD with 690K effective pixels for video - a vide system similar to that of the DCR-TRV33 and DCR-TRV38. The higher resolution CCD can record stills at 1152 x 864 pixel resolution. The $1,100 DCR-DVD300 includes all the features of the DCR-DVD200 however it includes a larger 3.5 in. LCD screen.

The DVD camcorders are arriving on the market at least three months later than Sony had originally said they would hit the market at CES. Sony spokesperson Rosemary Flynn stated that the reason for the delay was that ''This is a new product line for Sony and we wanted to make sure that it was up to the standard that customers have come to expect from the Hanycam brand.'' Early DVD camcorders suffered from major encoding problems. Yoshi Nishimura, Product Manager for Sony Camcorders U.S. assured that the Sony camcorders will not run into such problems ''Creating a good algorithm is very important with this kind of video and we've established a very high end algorthym.''