Sony Handycam SR35 30GB HDD Camcorder

this product is amazing and if you dont like it u r weird

This is a great first Camcorder, and at this price packs all the feature you will need from a hard disc cam. It may not have the docking station like its bigger brothers in the rang, however do you really need it? The 30GB hard drive will get you maybe 7 hours on HQ mode.
The lens on the unit is great, the zoom is particually good.
The software says that its not compatible with Vista 64bit edition - however i'm using that and so far haven't encounted any problems. However I would be inclined to use a 3rd party video editor if you are starting out or even dare I say Windows Movie Maker - the supplied software appears limited and the GUI is not as easy as I would expect for a camera aimed at beginners / all ages abilities.

My only critism is that Sony have knowingly supplied it with a lame battery. The Supplied will only get you about 50 minutes typical use, meaning you may well have to shell out a fair bit more a NP-FH70 or an NP-FH100, the NP-FH100 costing about £100 (Play.Com seem the best value)
Saying that, there is no denying that this is a full featured camera at a very resonable price. A worthy investment.

This is my third camcorder, the first being an old Video 8mm, the problem with that was being able to transfer to a PC but great quality, the Second was a DVD-R Camcorder, the good thing with this was that the media was cheap, but only being able to record 30 minuets straight to a 5cm DVD disk made it very limited and if the disk became corrupt at some point then the rest of the Disk became unreadable.
Now I decided to go for this cheaper Handycam, and so far this is for me the best one so far, it has some good features like touch screen, which is really good and it has night vision, not military night vision but more Most haunted type night vision. The main reason I got this handycam was that it didn't require media to record onto and that it was perfect for transferring to a PC, the feature I love best is the one touch record, plug the handycam into a PC insert a blank DVD and press the one touch record, within a few minuets you will have a watchable DVD.
Sure there are better Camcorders available but for £250 it has very good features and the picture quality is good. Playback on the PC wasn't great but I think that was down to my PC not having the correct Codecs.

So to sum up,
Its small
Its got a touch screen
Its got once touch record
It has night vision

forgot to mention, you can stick a memory stick into it and record straight onto the stick. ive added a 4gig stick into mine, oh! and it also take photos but my advice is to keep you Digital camera as the photos are not of a great quality, but the feature is there.if you want a budjet Camcorder then you cant go wrong with this, if your more into your camcorders then add another £100 and find something better

I strongly reccomend this product. Sony is quality, plus the Carl Zeiss lens is the cherry on top ofg the cake. It's light, the autofocus is fast and the quality of the movies is very good.