Sony HDR-SR12 10.2MP 120GB High Definition Hard Drive Handycam Camcorder with 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom
by Sony
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Sony HDR-SR12 10.2MP 120GB High Definition Hard Drive Handycam Camcorder with 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom
Customer Review: Fast and Excellent Service
Summary: 5 Stars
All I can say that I got exactly what I order.
Everything in good condition.
I do recommend this seller.
Customer Review: excelent
Summary: 5 Stars
everything was just perfect.
Amazon shipped very fast, i really love the camera, and recommend to everyone.
Customer Review: Great camera but need lots of CPU power to edit video
Summary: 4 Stars
I moved from a Sony Hi-8 camera that we had for 5 years prior to this, and the first word out of my mouth was "Wow!"
The tape-based camera was great for an NTSC camera. The video and audio quality were great for home movies and the occasional training videos that I used it for at work. Aside from the fact that it was a standard def picture, the biggest complaint was for the need for tapes. Needless to say, that old camera is now gathering dust.
No tapes, no memory cards means that you can take hours and hours of video without having to worry about missing anything (except when your battery runs out, so keep a spare).
The 1080i video from this camera is great. For those who are looking for professional quality video, I doubt that any consumer model is going to do it, but this camera comes very close. People choose point-and-shoot cameras for convenience, and DSLRs for quality. To expect otherwise is to fool yourself. However, I have not been disappointed by this camera for shooting video. The size and weight are great. It's not too small or too light to give you shaky videos, and it's small enough to fit into a small camera bag.
The low light shots are still good, but a little grainy - as expected. You can use night shot mode, but then you get that eery effect. The daytime shots are better than anything that I've seen on my satellite HD channels. AVCHD still looks better than that super-compressed MPEG4 video that they're transmitting on satellite. The colors are vibrant, and the video is quite realistic. We recently used this to record a cooking demonstration at work, and the closeups, even on a cheap 720p 32" television were clear and detailed so that people 20' away could easily see what was going on. The camera's LCD display even had better picture quality than the television itself! I like the touch screen display to keep the camera's looks clean, without cluttering it with tons of buttons.
Although I prefer to use a DSLR to take still photos, the HDR-SR12 takes really nice pictures. The flash is quite bright, and the photos come out very crisp and vibrant. The Sony software utilities even allow you to take hi-res still shots out of the video, which is quite nice. Sometimes, during video, you see a shot that would make a great still shot, and you can easily extract it.
The Sony utilities are a nice way to download the videos and stills from the camera. It's a nice way to browse your collection, and supports converting files to other formats. It's a little slow, but fortunately, the latest version of Adobe Premier Elements handles AVCHD natively. However, you will need at least a dual-core processor to handle video editing at HD. Even then, it's very processor intensive, and you'll notice skips in audio and video as you try to work with the clips. Of course, converting to MPEG2 resolves those problems completely, but who wants low-res video except for on the Internet?
The standard battery that comes with it is good for about 1.5 hours of recording. I bought a second one that gets me almost 2.5 hours of recording. With just 2 batteries, you can handle most tasks.
I did have a problem with static using a Sony wireless mic, but I think that it's the mic's fault, and not the camera's.
A feature that at first seemed gimmicky to me was the face recognition. It recognizes faces, and indexes them so that you can quickly view clips that have that person in them. It's nice to be able to go through lots of video on the camera, find a family member, and play a specific clip of them.
Although this is a great camera, I do have a few reservations that keep me from giving it 5 stars:
1) I had to get a separate battery charger to avoid carrying around a huge AC adapter.
2) What happens when the hard drive fails? We all know that it will some time, but if you don't back up, you'll lose everything. It doesn't seem like a user-serviceable part either.
3) I had to buy the mini HDMI cable separately.
4) My computer's hardware is barely able to work with AVCHD video. That means that I'd have to consider going to a quad-core one to get better performance (assuming that the software can handle the extra processors). This isn't necessarily the camera's fault, but hi-def video is just cpu-intensive.
5) No easy way to make hi-def videos for friends and families who don't have a computer, Blu-ray players or memory card readers for their TVs.
6) Trying to the videos on a Mac (or an older PC) was a nightmare because you have to convert to MPEG2 before doing anything... There may be affordable software for the Mac that can support AVCHD by now.
Overall, this is the camera that I wanted, and still would buy again if I had the choice. I've had it for 7 months, and have not regretted it.
Customer Review: Works fine with Macs
Summary: 4 Stars
So far, great experience with this camera. The resolutions are a little misleading if you are an HD techo-babble fan. It says it supports 1920x1080i on the side of the camera, but there's no such resolution. 1080i content is 1440x1080, while 1080p is 1920x1080. If you don't care or don't know the difference then don't sweat it, but if you are looking for 1080p using h.264 then this camera isn't it.
Back to the topic at hand. The information pages for this camera don't specifically say it is supported by Macs but I can confirm that it works with my Leopard install and that iMovie '08 detects the camera and offers to import the clips. This is all without having to download or install any software or drivers from Sony. If you are interested, the camera shows up as a mounted external drive and can be navigated like any other drive.
iMovie cross-converts the .mts files to .mov files and puts them on your local harddrive. .mts files are super compressed and for a variety of technical reasons most video editing software can't handle them in that format so they have to be converted. This conversion ends up increasing the file size by about 5x.
I've read elsewhere that the converted files can be up to 10x as big but the ones I converted this afternoon all came off the HD and onto mine in the new format 5x bigger in about 20 minutes. I'm on an 8 core macpro with 8 gig of ram so your conversion rates may vary, I have no idea how much hardware iMovie actually can take advantage of.
If you have final cut pro you can also obviously edit with these newly converted files. It wouldn't even let me drop the .mts files into a FCP timeline as it will with some other flavors of h.264.
The camera itself is a little off in its auto-white balance and its shutter is constantly a little too dark for my tastes but for the normal consumer I doubt you'll have any real complaints in there areas. The camera also has a built-in down convert to SD resolution with a simple RCA cable out of the camera and into your ancient tube TV.
Customer Review: Great camera BUT...
Summary: 4 Stars
Just took this on a three week foreign tour and it does a lot of things amazingly well. I did a lot of research and am quite knowledgeable, and was originally going to buy one of the new units that runs on flash cards because I liked their size. But they made too many compromise -- one of the worst of them being a lack of a viewfinder. I've never seen an LCD screen that wasn't washed out in sunlight (and this unit, while better than most, is no exception), so you NEED a viewfinder. Besides which, you get a lot less jiggling holding the camera up to your eye than holding it at arm's length to view an LCD screen.
The main caveat is its use of AVCHD as its recording format. This is another case of the hardware being ahead of the software. After extensive reading of the reviews of all the programs that currently exist, I've concluded that no one has yet come out with software to make editing this new format a simple affair. Sony's Vegas 8 (which costs $[...]+) seems, from the reviews and my limited testing, to come closest, but my expensive high-powered desktop (2 1/2 years old) stutters and chokes. AVCHD is highly compressed and requires a ton of CPU power. So, for now, I've decided to just show my raw footage to friends by connecting the camera directly to my HDTV, and wait until better software emerges or I'm ready to buy a new computer.
The quality and versatility of the camera are great, however, and I'm glad I didn't compromise to get a smaller unit. The hard drive helps give you a good solid grip using one hand, and I loved being able to stop worrying about running out of space (120gb is a huge amount of shooting).