Sony HDR-SR7 AVCHD 6.1MP 60GB High Definition Hard Disk Drive Camcorder with 10x Optical Zoom
by Sony
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Our Price: $884.00 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $449.00 (click here) Category: Digital Camera See more product details |
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Sony HDR-SR7 AVCHD 6.1MP 60GB High Definition Hard Disk Drive Camcorder with 10x Optical Zoom
Customer Review: Sony Camcorder - HD - HDD
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great product at good price. I had not used all the functions, as of now.Customer Review: Just got the camera yesterday
Summary: 4 Stars
I got the camera yesterday and have spent about an hour with it. The first thing I did was look for a mini-hdmi cable locally, but ended up buying it from Amazon via another vendor. While online on Amazon, I also noticed the price went up on this model - good timing for me as I thought the opposite would happen after I bought it.
The first impressions of this camera is that it is tiny. It looks much bigger in the pictures, but this is a small camera that packs alot of surprises. It just feels right in your hand and looks and feels well made/solid.
After charging it for about two hours, I started using it without reading the instructions. I heard all about the poor low light performance of the unit so I tried recording things in my living room with only one flourescent energy saving bulb on in the back of the living room. Then I went through and played with the menus to get myself familiar with the settings and noticed by default the HD recording setting was at 9MB/s so I changed it to XP - 15MB/s and recorded my living room again. I then connected the camcorder via component cables to my LCD TV. The first clip (9MB/s) came out ok. The clip was slightly grainy in the dark areas. For example, the components of my video/audio system was in a dark recess in the tv stand but I could see it although slightly grainy. That's to be expected since I'm sure a $50k HD camera will have similiar issue (I'm realistic about my purchases so this did not bug me). Now on to the second clip recorded at 15Mb/s. When I viewed the same scene of the A/V components, it was noticeable how much cleaner the edges were on the outlines of the A/V components. The overall clip was much sharper than the previous clip and right now I'm looking over at the components and I think the video in the second clip is clearer than what I can see with my naked eyes right now! Amazing. If you get this camera, make sure the HD setting is set to the highest mode - XP.
One thing I can say about the audio - before reading the reviews, I didn't think 5.1 was available on any consumer camcorders. I was surprised to learn it supports 5.1 (a big plus).
I had the TV on and I recorded my friend laughing in reaction to a program on TV and I could hear the laugh coming from the right (which is where my friend was sitting). The laugh, like the video, came out clear and distinct. I give audio a thumbs up. I heard the HDR-HC3 had issues with audio so I'm a happy camper here.
I basically tested this camcorder in moderate light situations which is a tough test for any camcorder. This camcorder (SR7) actually exceeded my expectations. I can't wait to see the picture quality of the video of scenes outside the house in day light. I can already assume I'll be amazed due to picture quality of the video I've seen in my other well lit rooms.
Coming from a Sony TR-81 Hi8 camcorder, I'd say the video quality is a big step beyond that of the TR-81. The TR-81 takes very good video, but the focus was slow and low light situation made focusing even worse. The SR7 focusing system is fast and in low light it's faster than my TR-81 in well lit areas.
I always wanted the Sony TR-101 after getting my TR-81. The TR101 was the camcorder I always look back and say, "I should of bought the TR-101 instead of the TR-81". Mainly because the TR-101 has mechanical/optical stabilization vs electronic stabilization. The TR81 has no stabilization. All the newer Sonys after the TR101 went with electronic stabilization for a few years (I remember it was due to royalty issues with Canon). Also the TR101 lens and lens housing was much bigger which made it look like a nicer/heaftier unit while the TR81 looked anemic compared to it (anyways, I digress...). Because of this (wanting the 101 over the 81), I got the HDR-SR7 over the HDR-SR5. The HDR-SR7 has mechanical stabilization AND it works well! One thing I noticed with the TR81 is that videos sometimes become almost unviewable when I'm taping without a tripod. With the SR7, the stabilization works! Zooming on a light switch across the house through three rooms, I will notice considerable vibration or jerkiness with the TR81. With the SR7, there is no jerkiness. You can see the video float up or down but there is no jerkiness.
Also, having a HD as the media to record on is nice and one of the main selling points for me to buy this unit. Having read the SR5 review, I noticed a few people complain about the HD noise being recorded on the tape. I didn't noticed this at all when taping the living room clips, but I did notice the HD clicking when the camera was pointed down at an angle. It seems like you can hear the HD stepping and it was caught on film! It's muffled, but it's there.
I'll be adding onto this review after about a month and will adjust my rating accordingly. This camera _IS_ a keeper. I will deduct a star from the 5 star rating for the noise issue mentioned above. Sony (and I'm sure others) will need to work on an isolation system for the HD so hard drive noise don't make it to the audio. I have an old Sony Ruvi camcorder which I bought new that records on some funky proprietary tape. You can hear the motor(s) on the audio track continuously. You can hear yourself zoom/pan and also hear the motor that continuously moves the tape during record. That and the funky proprietary tape was the downfall of that camcorder. I bought it at fry's at a discount - $199. I still wonder why I bought it because the noise is unbearable and I only used that camera a few times. Luckily, the SR7 is no where as bad as the RUVI. If this will be an issue, you might want to look at the HDR-CX7 which is the media stick version of this camcorder.
Overall, this is an excellent camera. I can't think of a better HD camera than the SR7, CX7 (pro duo media), HC7 (miniDV media), and SR5.
I checked both the JVC (GZ-HD7 - really love the looks of this unit) and Canon (HV10, HV20) offerings, but leaned towards the Sony after reading user's feedback on those units.
I probably shouldn't have mentioned the other cameras to keep this review focused on the SR7, but I'm sure there are old timers that had one of these cameras and can relate to my experience.
ADDED on 11/17/07 11:50pm: Ok, I just returned from a trip to San Francisco. I went to the Art Academy with a friend so she could check out the art school. I thought I would be amazed at the footage. I was expecting sharp and clear clips, but what I got was beyond that. I taped some skyscrapers from the base and panned up towards the sky - the entire footage was sharp, clear, and bright. There was no focusing issues. It seem better, if not on par, with the videos on Discovery HD. I'm not easily impressed, but I must say I am!! Anyone have an FTP site I can upload this clip? It looks like it was taped on a much more expensive unit. The blue of the sky was rich and brilliant against the white clouds and usually, with my old camcorder (TR81), if the scene goes from buildings to the sky as I pan up, you will get an overcompensation of light on the video clip. In otherwords, the sky will become too bright, then the video will take seconds to adjust and then the sky looks good, but the exposure on the building gets way too dark. This did not happen on the HDR-SR7. If I can only upload this clip for you guys to see. I'm not sure if I can upload the HD version to you tube. I'll look into it.
Anyways, I'm keeping this camera. It's unbelieveable (and I'm not that easily impressed, however, keep in mind these are consumer grade camcorder and it meets my expectations so YMMV).
Money well spent -- I questioned getting another camcorder the last few weeks, but not anymore.
There will be no perfect camcorder. The SR7 is a good compromise between what I want in a perfect camcorder and what is actually out there in the market. To me, excellent video quality in a small size with good sound was important to me. At first I did not consider the Sony because the effective resolution was 1440x1080 vs 1920x1080, but it seems overall the picture and the color accuracy on the Sony was better. Why get caught up in tech specs when it's the big picture that counts? Also, the Sony just felt right in the hand. It's small and well built. I don't want to be lugging anything that felt awkwardly large on vacation! The smaller the better and my choice was the HDR-SR7.
UPDATED 12/1/07: Still enjoying the camera. The battery seems to last about 90 minutes. Luckily I haven't gotten the "blue screen" issue the newer reviewers have ran into. I'll be using it at the SF auto show tomorrow so we'll see how it goes.
UPDATE 12/2/07: Ok, there seems to be an issue with the camera taking too long to focus sometimes. I mention earlier that focusing seems pretty quick, but at the auto show today, when I was ready to shoot, the camera was not focused for 3-4 shots (video and or photo). I had to move it around to get it to focus. Battery lasted for about 80 minutes or so. The colors came out excellent, but the focusing issue came to light today. It's best to leave the camcorder on standby since, if you turn it off, it will take a few seconds for the HD to come on line and you may miss a video or camera moment.
UPDATE 12/12/07: Because of the AVCHD compression, if you move the camera the clip of the scene as the camera is moved doesn't look too smooth. That's probably the biggest annoyance to me. The sw is great, but limited in terms of editing (very very limited). You can view HD quality clips on your laptop. I have a dell 9400 with a 1920x1200 (WUXGA) display and I'm getting HD quality while viewing it on the laptop - just amazing.
UPDATE 1/22/08: I got back from a trip to Europe last week to pickup a car I bought and used this camera (SR7) extensively. Since this review is already so long, I'll just sum up my feelings of this camera having owned it almost two months:
Pros: Great video quality when there is enough light. Great sound.
Cons: Video quality gets grainier as amount of light decreases. Sometimes you can hear the hard drive step. Picture quality is good, but a stand alone camera is better. Also, the camera sometimes loses focus - you'll have to aim it somewhere else to move back to your "target" to get it to focus correctly.
No surprises really - I covered this before.
Since I've owned this camera for two months, the newness of it has worn off and I'm obviously pointing out the weaknesses more than the the pluses because that's what bugs me. Overall, great camera. I'm sure any other camera will have deficencies (I'm picky but overall still happy with this camera).
UPDATE 10/25/10: I haven't used this camera in over a year as I had many life changing events recently (getting married, moving, honeymoon, loss of job, etc). The camera basically got boxed up and was in storage. I wanted to use it for my honeymoon, but didn't know where all the parts were as they were in separate boxes. I finally got around to finding the SR-7 and its accessories so I can use for Nascar in Fontana. It took excellent pictures and videos and I'm still amazed at the quality of the images, esp in an environment such as nascar (bright daylight). I ran out of diskspace (used up all of 60G) just before the event and decided to upgrade the HD (hard drive) myself. Couldn't find anyone that has upgraded to the 120G drive and ordered a 120GB ZIF drive on ebay (Toshiba MK123GAL). Unfortunately, I didn't get it in time for NASCAR, but about two weeks ago I got the drive. That night I took off the cover to the HD, popped out the old one and put the new one in and it worked! The two things you need to keep in mind is to learn how to work the ZIF mechanism (I was careless and the black strip came off and it took me a while to figure out what to do with it) and the second is that once the HD is installed, you must format it! Before I removed the old HD, I removed all video and pictures and was left with 485 mins of high bitrate recording (XP mode). After I formatted the new drive, I was at 979 mins of recording. Also, the drive is so much quieter. When It turned the camcorder on, it made absolutely no noise. I thought I got a bad HD. For kicks, I formatted it to see if I would get errors and it seem to hang (could hear no noise from the HD). It finally finished and I realize my upgrade was successful. I took a movie and a picture and it did record both. I must have gotten a very quiet drive because there is absolutely no noise. My old 60G HD is noisy in comparison. You can hear the drive step the heads and it gets recorded in the videos! So this upgrade improved not only the recording capacity of the Sony HDR SR-7, but it also makes the camcorder completely silent (I guess I should put a disclaimer and say that your mileage will vary).
Please comment on this review if you upgraded your SR-7 after reading this. Thanks.
Now, I forgot to mention the bad about the SR-7 during nascar. I got a pitpass so I was able to get very close to the action. When the racecar zoomed by, it was loud. My SR-7 would quit recording with a buffer overflow or data error. It happened every time. I learned to work around this but stopping the recording after 3-4 secs of loud noise and restarting the recording, but it was the first time I ran into this issue which I read about here. It seem to have recorded the videos up to the point where the buffer overflow happened. The camcorder would repair the damage to the file and I would be able to record again. I'm not sure how to work around this (other than the one I mentioned above) and I believe there is no fix to this to this day. Is there a way to tur off the mic? I __should__ downgrade my review by one star for this.
I'm also reading the latest comments on this camera and it seems that this line of cameras have issues with the optical image stabilizer causing focusing issues. I have not run into this problem (yet). Hopefully, I will never run into this issue, but I will update again if I do.
Customer Review: Worth the price tag
Summary: 4 Stars
I am writing this review after using this camcorder for 1 full month of trip to Africa.
Why Did I buy This:(buyers have to be clear on this)
I checked out the differences between a High definition video and standard definition video. I totally fell for high definition. The pixel ratio in high definition is nearly twice as much as standard definition video. Result - life like colors, better quality video.
I have plans to buy a HD tv in the future. So, this would fit perfectly to the package.
I wanted to store each and every part of my trip.
Now for the Pros:
The colors are absolutely rich and fantastic - both in the video and still images. I liked the photos I took using this camcorder more than my digital camera.
The night shot is amazing. Not many camcorders give a better night shot than this. The video quality in the night shot is rendered by CMOS Vid sensor.
The 60Gb hard disk is quite enough to store nearly 20 hours of video. I could not max out my hard disk in my entire trip. So, I am assuming 60G does a good job of storage service.
For users who do not know how to edit HD video or do not want HD video, this camcorder also offers the option to record SD video. For people who want to convert the HD video to SD, they can do that too using the SONY software that ships with the camcorder.
For professional users, Sony Vegas 7.0 should do the job. I edited my videos using Vegas 7.0 and didn't lose any quality.
The product overall was compact in size and light in weight and I was able to carry it everywhere in my carry on bag.
Not too many cons:
1. The battery that ships with the camcorder lasts for 90 minutes of video. So, frequent users need to buy additional battery for long trips.
2. The sony docking station is an additional piece of baggage that comes with this camcorder. The most annoying part is that you have to charge the camcorder through the docking station(I didn't try to charge it directly through the dc input - users should try that out). And transferring the photos that are stored in the hard disk can only be done through the docking station. Overall - it's an irritating piece and sony should get rid of it in future.
I think overall this is worth the price tag.
Customer Review: Great amazon.com customer service!
Summary: 4 Stars
This is the first camcorder that I've ever bought. I was looking at hard-drive models (vs minidv or dvd) and there were considerable options from Sony, Panasonic, JVC, and Canon. The 60 gb hard-drive, ability to do Hi-Def, take still photos, and sony reputation were what eventually drove my decision to get the SR7. I used the camcorder on my 3-wk vacation in December and it worked flawlessly.
However, when I got back, I started getting these error messages that said that the database image file was corrupted. Maybe because the hard-drive was full? When I tried to move the data I had captured on my vacation, I was only able to grab 50% of the video, but luckily all of the photos. After 2 weeks I gave up on the file transfer and tried to reformat the hard-drive. It then gave me another error message that said that was not possible. I spent four hours with Sony tech support to diagnose the problem. In the end, they couldn't help me and suggested that the camcorder might be defective.
I promptly requested an RMA from amazon and I got a replacement within a week. I decided to give Sony one more chance, even though I lost half of my video from my vacation.
So far the camcorder is working ok. I suggest transferring the contents of the hard drive periodically, so that it doesn't get full and easily corruptable. It doesn't bode well for long trips. The still images are not as good as a regular digital camera. But the video quality is good. This is my first camcorder, so I have no frame of reference on the video quality.
So far the replacement is functioning ok.
Customer Review: A great perfomer
Summary: 4 Stars
The details have been covered in other reviews, but in short this is a great camera. I dove in knowing that AVCHD has yet to be supported by major professional non-linear editors such as premiere with the hope they will soon or at least some day. For the most part I don't plan to capture in HD, but I wanted the ability to when the opportunity/need arose.
Simply put it takes amazing quality video in all digital. That is what I wanted, and that is what I get. I shoot primarily in SD high quality mode and find myself even after a week in Yellowstone not touching the capacity of this drive.
Just last week I filmed an entire pee wee football game in clips per play, went home and had a highlight reel compiled and exported within an hour and a half. I would have spent that much time just importing my tapes with my previous DV camera.
The stabilization is great, though even with it at full zoom I would recommend a tripod or at least a monopod. The on screen menus work just fine, though I am not a big fan of touch screen I can navigate to my needs quickly.
I grabbed an extra high capacity battery and external charger so I wouldn't be limited by battery life at any time. I recommend anyone with a camera in general to do the same. It's a pricey camera, but in the long run I have no doubt I will get my value out of it.