Sony DCR-TRV240 Camcorder Review

by Robin Liss
Published on Mar 24, 2002 12:00 AM



The Sony DCR-TRV240 is same as the 140 except with the added ability to play back Hi8 and 8mm tapes,with a street price around $600. The 240 is a good choice if you have an old Hi8 or 8mm camcorder and you don't need digital stills, but it isn't good for much else.

The DCR-TRV240 has a single, 460K 1/6 in. CCD. The DCR-TRV240's rated horizontal resolution is 500 lines. The optical zoom is 20x while the digital zoom is a huge 560x. The DCR-TRV240 has a 2.5 in. LCD and a black and white viewfinder. The DCR-TRV240 also includes a remote and a 50 minute battery. The DCR-TRV240 has a 25x optical, 700x digital zoom.

As for picture controls, the DCR-TRV240 has a manual focus ring, plus a zoom rocker. The camcorder has a minimum shutter speed of 1/4000 and a maximum shutter speed of 1/4. The camcorder offers both pre-programmed auto exposure modes and manual exposure control. White balance is automatic and there is a variety of special effects also offered. The camcorder includes FireWire (i.Link as Sony likes to call it) in and out, plus composite in and out.

All other Digital8 camcorders playback old Hi8 and 8mm tapes, this typically is a major selling point of the format, because it is good for transition. The DCR-TRV240 does not support playback of old Hi8 and 8mm tapes. If you don't have old Hi8 or 8mm tapes you shouldn't worry you might want to look at other camcorders because the benefits of Digital8 decrease with out this need.

Digital8 is a digital format that Sony invented for low end camcorders, in an effort to bring digital video to more people. Digital8 records the same signal as MiniDV tapes onto Hi8 and 8mm tapes. Because there is more information is the digital signal than was in the classical Hi8 and 8mm signals, the tapes are recorded onto at double speed.

One of the downsides of the DCR-TRV240 is the lack of manual control. The camcorder lacks control of manual white balance and manual shutter speed and manual gain. Sony intentionally leaves out control of manual features on these camcorders to persuade those who want to do more professional shooting with their camcorders to buy the more expensive models. In fact the camcorders have manual white balance, manual shutter speed and manual gain built into them (possibly because the software inside the camcorder is the same as that in higher models), but it they are disabled. It is possible to enable them however you can break the camcorder trying to.

The microphone is placed right below the camcorder lens which is good placement. Smaller camcorders place the microphone often on the top of the camcorder facing up to the sky, which results in poor pickup of the sound you want in front of the camcorder, and pickup of the sound you don't want behind the camcorder. The camcorder has two sound recording options. You can either record in 12-bit mode with two tracks of audio, or in 16-bit mode with one track of audio. The camcorder also has a 1/8 in. mini-plug microphone in jack and a similar headphone jack for monitoring audio during playback and recording.

For still capabilities the DCR-TRV240 does not have any external media to save digital stills on to. Instead, there is a button which takes a freeze frame of the video and saves it to video. The stills are really poor quality and fuzzy and there is no reason you couldn't achieve the same effect by just taking stills from your video using your computer.

The DCR-TRV240 has other extra features. You can wirelessly play your videos on your VCR from up to 26 feet away using Sony's Super Laser LinkŪ Wireless Transmitter, however you need to buy a receiver and the camcorder has to be in the line of sight of the receiver. The camcorders is rated at 0 LUX, however this is only with the use of Sony's NightShot, low light recording system. Older NightShot recorded in a mono-color green hue, but Sony has upgraded the system to full color night shot.

The DCR-TRV240 also has a USB port to use the camcorder as a web cam. You can't use this USB port to transfer stills to your computer but you can use it as a web cam. The USB port works with Microsoft NetMeeting to do streaming over the web and video conferencing over the internet. You can stream both live and recorded video.

Typically I am a big fan of Digital8 camcorders but recent efforts by other manufacturers to improve the features of their budget MiniDV camcorders had made low budget MiniDV camcorders more appealing and the low budget Digital8 camcorders less appealing. The DCR-TRV240 is a great choice if you have an old Hi8 or 8mm camcorder and you want to be able to playback those tapes on your new camcorder or if you want to edit them digitally. However, because the camcorder lacks digital still capability it's behind on features when compared to similarly priced MiniDV models by Panasonic and even Canon.