The quest for convenience

By PETER GRIFFIN

In the next few years footage we shoot on our video cameras will be recorded straight to removable flash memory cards with gigabytes of storage or tiny Blue-ray hard drives embedded in the camera.

It's all about the quest for convenient and high-quality storage. At the moment, the dominant storage format for video cameras is still the miniDV tape.

But a few manufacturers, including Sony, are building mini-DVD drives into their cameras. Instead of recording to digital video tapes, which are considered a pretty good quality, users burn straight to DVD.

Imagine that - shoot your movie and while the disk is still hot from being "burnt", pop it in your DVD player and begin watching.

That's exactly what Sony's 201E promises. No more transferring footage to the PC or plugging the camera into a VCR to move the footage to a large-format tape.

This effectively brings video cameras to the shoot and replay cake walk of digital still devices.

But convenience comes at a cost.

The video quality is slightly poorer than footage recorded to tape because when transferred to DVD it is subject to greater digital compression. An 8cm DVD will hold up to an hour of mpeg-2 video or 20 minutes at the best quality setting.

You might be happy with that if the 201E was laden with features but it is virtually a standard single-chip camera producing a modest 690,000 to 1 million effective pixels.

There's no built-in flash, no Memory Stick slot or USB streaming capability. It does have Sony's slick styling and USB 2.0 for fast transfer of footage to PC. It also comes with ImageMixer software to allow you to put together a simply edited movie.

Initially, the 8cm DVD disks that the 201E uses came at a hefty premium but the price has come down to about $12 to $20 for a 1.4 gigabyte disk capable of holding an hour of high-quality video. MiniDV tapes have a similar price range.

On the upside you can pay a bit more for DVD-RW disks and reuse them with little loss of quality.

Check what DVD player you have before settling on the 201E. It supports DVD-RW and DVD-R. Using DVD-R disks will ensure compatibility with most DVD players.

The 201E looks a reasonable option for those willing to sacrifice a bit in quality and sophistication for convenience.

And let's face it, most video camera users are unlikely to sit at a computer editing a home movie.

Other miniDV-based cameras from the likes of Panasonic and Canon in the same price range have more features. The question you have to ask is how much you value the instant gratification of DVD.

Sony Handycam 201E

* Price: $1800

* Pros: Easy to use, instant playback with DVD

* Cons: Reduced video quality, light on features, average software

* Herald Rating: 6.5/10


Sony Website