New eye on the world

Just in time for the summer holidays, I bought a new, small and lightweight 1080p HD widescreen Sony video camera. It's a nice looking thing that records only to sony memory sticks. It's name is the Sony HDR TG3E. Now that's what I call a sexy name! I wish more companies would uses letter / number combinations for their product names. It just rolls of your tongue so easily doesn't it? HDR TG3E. It's great! It's so unlike those boring Apple names like "iPhone" and "MacBook". No, Sony gets it!

Anyway, this camera is so small, that they omitted the view finder, which makes it rather awkward to use in sunny spots. The other thing they did with it is move most of the controls to the touchscreen. And Sony is so confident that it's easy to use, that they don't even provide a booklet on how to get started. This lack of buttons and view finder makes it a very attractive looking camera, which of course, they had to undo a bit by plastering all kinds of stickers on them to advertise it greatness.

The good things about this camera are:

• It's very light and small, meaning that it easily fits in the pocket of your coat. However, since I bought it for the summer holidays, this is a moot point because I don't wear coats in summer.
• Because there is no view finder, you need the screen to film. Sony made it so, that the camera starts the moment you flip open the screen, thus saving another button.
• The fact that it uses memory sticks instead of tape means that it starts very fast. It even has an automatic stand-by mode that makes it even faster to stop and re-start filming.
• The memory card also gets rid of the fear that you tape over a previous scene.
• The zooming button is slowed down considerably compared to my previous camera, making it almost impossible to zoom too fast in a shot.
• Getting rid of the tape means that transferring your video from the camera can be done at much higher speeds, without the possibility of frames that are dropped. With a tape, there is always the possibility that the computer is too busy with other things to be able to capture al frames. With a memory card, this is no longer an issue because it has direct access.

Of course there are also some bad things about it:

• The battery has a small capacity. You can only shoot up to 40 minutes of video with it.
• The battery is placed inside the camera, making it look nice, but disallowing you to attach a bigger capacity battery.
• The Wide-angle on the lens is not very wide. Making some shots hard to capture. I've ran into this more times than I would like.

But overall, I'm quite pleased with this new camera. If you want, you can find some films at YouTube.

Zaaf