Great HD camcorder at a very reasonable price

I recently bought this camcorder from Ebay for £440.00. The model that I have is the American model but all the SR5s are universal and you can simply change it to PAL mode in the menu. I been very impressed so far and would certainly recommend this camcorder to anyone that is looking to buy a decent High Definition camcorder.
Whats in the box

The camcorder comes complete with a built in 40 GIG hard drive so there isn't any need for any tapes or a DVD. The camcorder works in the usual way, a record button is located at the rear and you simply press once to start and once again to complete the record and store the date on the hard drive. You can then access the saved image by using the menu on the 2.7 touch screen. The menu itself is very easy to use and is well described in the manual. One very useful feature is that all the videos are saved in date order so it is easy to flick back through all the videos that you have captured.
The battery that was supplied apparently has a life of 160 minutes, I found this to be slightly inaccurate; I would estimate that the actual battery life is around 110-120 minutes, not a huge difference but it means that you need a spare battery. This brings me to a bit of a flaw with the system; the camcorder is not supplied with any separate unit for charging the battery, in fact the battery needs to be charged attached to the camcorder and lodged on the docking station, this makes charging a spare battery rather annoying and cumbersome as you can't charge two batteries at the same time.

There are several ways in which you can play back your videos; the first and most obvious is directly through a TV. Here you can connect the camcorder by an AV cable or by using an HDMI cable if you have an HD TV. However, I did get a nasty surprise when I received my HDMI cable as I found that it did not fit my camcorder. In fact the camcorder uses mimi HDMI and so you either need an HDMI mini converter (bought one from Amazon for about £6) or you can purchase a mini HDMI to HDMI cable which are quite expensive and obviously only going to fit your camcorder.
You can also hook the camcorder up to your PC and view the images with your bundled software.The supplied software is very easy to use and plays back the AVCHD files on any computer. The Software also works on Vista which is very useful for anyone that has just bought a new computer.

Image quality
The quality of the image is quite impressive in either standard definition or 1080 HD format. In the HD format I found the image to be crisper and clearer and the colours more vivid. The camcorder uses an electronic super steady shot stabiliser to help keep the images clear when moving but it still does not prevent the image getting a bit blurred if you move the camcorder quickly. Overall I have been very impressed with the image quality and found it to be step up from the standard definition camcorders.