Subscribe
The Sony Handycam DCR-DVD101 is more compact and offers better low-light focusing than its predecessor, but this model remains an underfeatured underachiever for a camcorder in its price range. The biggest problem: relatively poor video quality due to the low-resolution 340,000-pixel CCD the camera uses for recording.
Design
With its slick black-and-metallic-blue case, the Sony Handycam DCR-DVD101 is as likely as the latest iPod to garner admiring looks. This model is about two-thirds the size of its predecessor, the DVD100, making it no larger than a typical DV camcorder. It fits comfortably in your right hand and weighs under 500g with disc and battery installed. The 7.6cm DVD-R/DVD-RW drive sits on the right side of the unit and opens to the front so you can easily swap discs while the camera is mounted on a tripod.
Sony positions the controls in logical and comfortable locations. Unlike many recent Sony camcorders, this one doesn’t bury common functions in a touch-screen menu system. A few dedicated buttons sit on the exterior; the rest, including the playback controls, hide behind the LCD screen. The latter buttons have a soft, almost flat design that on other cameras can be awfully frustrating when you are trying to make a quick adjustment while shooting; here, though, the buttons feature raised outlines that make pressing the right spot fairly easy. Additional buttons mounted next to the LCD display let you toggle the backlight and start and stop recording — handy when you’re holding the camcorder high or low.
Features
For a camera with a price just over AU$1,500, the Sony Handycam DCR-DVD101 is equipped with a decidedly low-end set of features. Its 1.5cm CCD imager offers a mere 340,000-pixel resolution — half that of the next model up, the DVD201, and of most competing camcorders in this price range. The DVD101’s Carl Zeiss lens delivers a basic 10X optical zoom reach. Audio fares better, with support for two-channel Dolby Digital AC-3 audio recording, though there’s no jack for an external microphone. This model does support 16:9 wide-screen mode, however, which the low-end Hitachi model does not.
The DVD101 includes manual exposure and focus options along with six auto-exposure presets. Sony often loads its camcorders with an abundance of special effects, but here they’re limited to luminance keying, the ever-cheesy Old Movie mode, and the Sepia, Pastel, B&W, and Mosaic effects. The DVD101 offers Sony’s trademark NightShot and Super NightShot infrared modes and a fader setting for scene transitions. It also features Sony’s Intelligent accessory shoe for adding lights and other accessories.
The DVD101 records to write-once DVD-R or rewriteable DVD-RW discs. Using the latter discs, you gain some basic editing capabilities, including the ability to split, reorder, and delete scenes. When you finalise the disc, the DVD101 creates a DVD menu that you can use to navigate your clips on a set-top player. It can also create a video slideshow of any images on the disc. The camera lacks a Memory Stick slot, instead storing still images on DVD.
If your computer can read DVD-ROMs, file transfer is a snap — just drop the finalised disc in the drive. Otherwise, you can use the included USB cable to move video and stills to your PC; the camcorder mounts as a drive for easy transfer. Mac users are out of luck: Sony doesn’t include any Mac software, and the DVD101 lacks a FireWire (or as Sony calls it, iLink) port.
The supplied composite/S-Video cable lets you connect to a television for playback or to another source to transfer video from analog devices to DVD. The bundled infrared remote is handy for controlling the camcorder in either application.
Performance
The DVD101’s biggest performance drawback — as with all DVD-recordable camcorders — is the time it takes the camcorder to spin up a disc and read its contents. We’ve clocked it at close to 30 seconds before the camcorder was ready to shoot. Otherwise, the camcorder performed well. The Sony Handycam DCR-DVD101’s comfortably placed zoom switch offers precise control, allowing you to zoom smoothly at a languid or zippy pace. Electronic image stabilisation proved effective at wide angles and at up to medium zoom, but camera shake became evident at the 10X end of the camcorder’s zoom range.
The DVD101’s automatic focus performed quickly and accurately in both bright and dim light. The 6.4cm LCD is viewable even in direct sunlight, but its small size makes it difficult to use for manually focusing. The colour viewfinder provides very good resolution and can tilt upwards to give more flexibility in shooting angles.
The stereo microphone does a good job picking up narration, dialogue, and ambient sound. Its position on the front of the camera, however, puts it close to the DVD drive, where in very quiet shooting situations it picked up the sound of the drive spinning up and down. Furthermore, the DVD101 lacks a wind filter, so on several occasions our test footage recorded noticeable wind noise from a slight breeze.
Image Quality
We’d consider the Sony Handycam DCR-DVD101’s image quality only borderline acceptable on a camera half as expensive; at this model’s price, it doesn’t cross the border. You can spot the effects of its low resolution in its lack of sharpness and noticeable pixelation, even in footage shot under optimal light. Colour reproduction looks good for videos shot under bright light, but footage shot in a dimly lit hallway looks almost monochromatic. Ditto for stills: the DVD101’s 640×480-pixel still images are grainy and pixelated, even when shot outdoors in bright light.
Sony’s Super NightShot mode lets you film under conditions too dark for traditional shooting, but the infrared lighting makes your footage look like a view through night-vision goggles. In ambient light, colours are a bit more evident than with some earlier iterations of this technology, but most of the image is overwhelmed by a strong light-green cast.
For More Information please go to Shop CNET to compare Camcorders specs and prices side-by-side.