The new camcorder came on Wednesday. I haven’t had a whole lot of chances to mess with it, but here’s some initial thoughts:

Depending on the shooting conditions video ranges from very, very good to pretty fucking sweet. I’d have been entirely ok with it and regular prices. For under $700, I’m estatic.

The thing is built like a tank – solid and wider than it is tall.

At the full 1920 x 1080, the hard drive holds around 15 hours of video. That should work until I’m able to finally upgrade my PC (long overdue). Right now I can store the video on one of my external drives if I want, but I’m not able to edit in any reasonable fashion. (so no samples for a little while)

It’s a consumer level Sony product, not a lot beyond pointing and shooting. It literally has an “easy” button on it…for real. A button labeled ‘Easy’. That’s ok though, I only need to point and shoot. There is the cool CAM Control button/dial on the front that you can assign a few functions to (focus, exposure, etc) that offer a bit of manual control. Using that and different shooting modes, I was able to get a pretty shallow DOF that looked kind of nice.

It records in 5.1 which is fun to say.

Probably lots of other little things that I’ll think of, find or use as time goes on.

I’m a happy boy.