Camcorder Review:
Sony HDR-SR12 Camcorder

The latest and best consumer HD offering by Sony, the SR12 Handycam, will please buyers with good images and high usability. This well-designed camera packs some nice features into its sleek frame. Perhaps it isn't the cheapest camera, but the good news is that it isn't a cheap camera.

For the advanced weekend shooter, the feature set should prove challenging and rewarding. And the image quality will surely satisfy. The resolution of the SR12 goes up to a full 1920 x1080i, with a data rate of up to 16Mbps.

The SR12 aims at the upper end of the consumer market. You will want to investigate this camera if you are a serious hobbyist itching to abandon your standard-definition tape-based camcorder.

The almost silent 120GB internal hard drive can store nearly 15 hours of the highest-resolution video - nearly 84 hours of highly-compressed HD. And about a gazillion stills. If you do run out of space, go to the nearest camera shop and pick up a Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo and start recording to that. The ability to record to either the hard drive or the memory card adds valuable flexibility.

For those who like the camera but want to save a couple hundred bucks, the SR11 is identical except for a smaller 60GB hard drive. It's all in the value you place on the extra storage. Since the street price of the SR12 is many hundreds less than the MSRP, most folks will consider doubling the capacity to be well worth the price.

The slim camera body fits into the right hand, held by a Velcro strap. The left hand operates the menu options on the touchscreen LCD display - and adds necessary stability, since the compact profile tends to allow the camera to roll on the palm of the right hand. (I hate to admit that, in this one regard, those cute pistol grip cameras have an advantage).

Your right index finger easily triggers the Photo button, either in standby mode or while recording video. So as you take video of your subjects and you see the perfect still... snap! You've got it waiting for you on the hard drive.

If you want to keep operations extremely simple, just press the Easy button on the left side of the camera. Most of those pesky technical settings disappear from the menu options, and you have a true point-and-shoot camera ready for your Funniest Home Videos masterpiece.

In normal mode, you do have those pesky - and highly useful - menu options that allow for better control of your image. Using either the touchscreen or the knurled metal knob at the front of the camera, you can manually control the focus and the exposure. The Spot Focus and Spot Meter functions allow you to touch a specific spot on the LCD display and have the camera adjust to that part of the frame.

Your right index finger also controls the zoom with a small rocker switch. The limited throw of this small switch takes a bit of practice, but fine control is possible. With a gentle input, we achieved a very slow, smooth zoom. Your left thumb hovers over two buttons on the side of the LCD display that give one-speed zoom in and out.

The optical zoom goes up to 12x. The digital zoom goes WAY up to 150x, if you let it. There is a slight hesitation as the camera transitions between optical and digital zoom. It would have been nice to have a longer pause or a second control input required to activate digital mode, since many users want the feature on, but also want protection against inadvertent usage.

Generally, I disapprove of digital zoom on principle. Reluctantly, I must admit that the image quality of the SR12 renders a decent-looking image up to about 20x and a home-movie image up to about maybe 50x - far better than I'm used to seeing in a single-chip camera.

A small docking bay gives you the option of keeping your power, A/V out and USB cables all plugged in, so all you have to do is set the camera down and you're ready to rock and upload. On the other hand, it gladdened our hearts to see all the same jacks plus HDMI available right on the body of the camera, thus leaving the docking station an option, not a necessity.

One of the features we liked most was the 3.2-inch 16:9 LCD display itself. It's big and beautiful. The colors show up very well, and the resolution makes focusing much easier than with a smaller display.

Almost all the options and controls reside in the touchscreen menus. We found some of the groupings a bit counterintuitive, but physically making the selections proved comfortable. Even while using the flat edge of my largish thumb, I very seldom clicked the wrong button.

As nice as the SR12 is, it is not a professional camera. And it isn't trying to be. If you were looking for a primary-use camera for your new production company, you would likely want a camera that could control the shutter speed, one with a "normal" accessory shoe, one with audio gain control and VU meters.

Sony could also have made the AC power pack double as an external battery charger like they used to do for their larger cameras. Yeah, I'm thinking like a guy with one battery in the camera, another in his pocket and a third one charging at all times, but I doubt I'm alone in this line of reasoning.

The on-board mic performs reasonably well, but it seems very sensitive to the handling of the camera. A tap from my wedding ring on the end of the LCD display transferred loud and clear to the audio track. Serious users may want to use an external mic of some kind.

Despite the small size of the imaging chip (1/3 inch), there is comparatively little noise, even in deep shadows. Sony sings loudly the praises of its Exmor technology, which has dual noise-reduction circuitry combined with a large array of on-chip A/D converters. That is to say... for a consumer-class camcorder, the SR12 makes pretty pictures.

The color rendering is accurate. The automatic white balance performs very nicely in a variety of situations, both indoors and out. The manual white balance adjusts itself quickly. The video images please the eye as-is, but it would have been nice to see manual color saturation and image sharpness controls. We found the low-light performance acceptable, but not amazing. The specs say you're good down to 5 lux, but the colors get pretty washed-out at that level.

The auto-focus works about as well as most. It takes about a second to get its bearings when jolted from extreme close-up to infinity. It could track a cyclist coming toward the camera at about seven miles per hour. When the same exercise was in dappled shadows, it couldn't cope (but I don't know an auto-focus that could).

The auto-exposure takes about 2.5 seconds to adjust to the torture of going from extreme low light immediately to full sunlight. It was gratifying to see it able to strike a fair balance in scenes with both deep shadows and hot spots, not favoring either too much.

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