First transfer to computer brought tears to my eyes

In 1999 I graduated from film school. In those days camcorders were either big clunky things that used video tapes or little things with super tiny discs that often got trapped in computers.  Editing film or video was not easy. If you could upload images from your camera to your computer you needed an advanced degree to edit it. 

Now with Windows Vista you can just upload the images to the computer without tears or pulling out any of your hair and review them. You can easily edit them with Sony's easy to install software.

The camera does have a long learning curve probably far longer if you don't have training but it is doable. You should watch the DVD they provide with the camera even if you know what you're doing but especially if you don't.

If you learn to support the camera while shooting and pan slowly you can get a smooth pan and a decent image even in poorly lit middle school gym shooting video of a girl's basketball game as I was doing.

The best part though is uploading the images and going through them and editing. If you're used to dingy editing rooms and splicing film or using difficult older video editing programs you might find yourself in tears and saying to yourself I KNEW it could be this easy. I was computer literate years ago and never understood why it was so hard to edit videotape, which I always saw as conceptually simple. Only the software was complex.

I've only had this camera about a month and I have like 9 30 minute discs from which I might end up with a 10 minute final product. I bought a few cheaper 8 cm mini DVD's that aren't rewritable for early practice but I think that for most people rewritable media is worth the extra cost.

Sony's software allows you to make copies of your edited work to standard DVD's easily so you can actually produce copies fairly inexpensively.

There is no substitute for some training. I am amazed by how many people's amateur videos I have watched that were created by equally good Sony cameras that are shaky, have top speed jerky pans, and fail to show you where they're shooting. Vegas vacation video someone once showed me that ONLY showed the inside of the hotel room and the people on the trip against a variety of generic backgrounds come to mind. Also someone I knew once went to Lake Tahoe and failed to shoot any scenes of the scenery but lots of the hotel parking lot and people standing next to the car waving.

While I would prefer a full size DVD the 8 cm ones (3.15 inches)  aren't too bad. They don't fall through in my laptop which is a nice change from the smaller earlier minidiscs that people were always calling me about back in my Apple tech support days.

I found the owner's manual a little annoying. Sony could stand way out in front of the competition if t hey woud make a different manual for each of their camcorder models, make the macnual a little higher in quality like a magazine and add a clearer and more detailed writing style (something along the lines of one of those "Quick Start Guides" or For Dummies Books) The manual will not be that easy for a first time camcorder owner. I don't think most beginners understand "wide angle lens" or "white balance" or a lot of other technical terms.