Sony Handycam DCR-HC35E > Reviews (5)

We have bought one of these for when we go to Ecuador next year and what a great purchase it was too.

The Sony DCR HC35 is a MiniDV camcorder with 20x optical zoom and a monstrous digital zoom, crystal clear LCD screen with touch controls and Nightshot.

The MiniDV format has been around for some years now and a lot of folks are changing to MiniDVD. We have stuck with the old format for a couple of reasons the first being the resolution of MiniDV is still higher than DVD oddly enough. Not much though. And the second is the affordability as you can get this camcorder for £220, which is a steal, and MiniDV tapes are relatively cheap and quite robust.

One huge word of warning though. Lithium Ion batteries. This camcorder will not accept third party batteries at all, only genuine Sony batteries. I've tried an Energizer battery and it charges fine but as soon as you go to use it a message appears on the LCD telling you that the battery is not an InfoLithium and the camcorder then shuts down. Apparently, its something to do with Sony not warranting products that use third party products in conjunction because of the risk that the batteries are not certified by them.
Actually it gives Sony a huge excuse to charge you a monster amount for a battery with a decent record time as what comes in the box lasts 30-45 minutes only.

Battery costs are: FP50 £50, FP71 £72 and FP90 £110!

The big battery lasts for about 3-4 hours they say but it is a large extra cost on top of the initial purchase price.

Now the good bits! Picture and sound quality are top notch as you would expect with Sony. Sound is stereo and does not pick up too much wind noise. Picture is clear and the image stabilizer does a good job if you only use optical zoom. I don't recommend digital zoom, (And you can turn it off), because of the degradation of picture quality but its there for just in case.
The unit is really very small and fits snugly into the palm of the hand. One-handed operation is easy and the zoom and record/ stop buttons are a mere thumb/ finger away.
The LCD screen is very clear and has the touch-screen to alter the settings of the camcorder and operate playback of your recordings. The screen can be flipped and rotated to allow viewing from different angles and self-recording for the vain among you! The viewfinder is also colour and just as clear.
If you want to keep things really simple, then you can just press the EASY button on the camcorder. This basically operates all the light modes and shutter speeds etc for you without you manually altering. Great for the amateur like me until you can get used to the different modes like Nightshot, sports setting, backlight, etc.
The camcorder comes with a docking cradle too for charging and PC linking and this works like a dream. There is only a USB cable in the box and this does not allow for live streaming of the picture to your computer so you must also purchase a Firewire cable too. I bought a Playstation2 Link Lead for £4-99 from a game store after realizing that I had 4-pin Firewire on my laptop so this lead worked a treat and saved me £15!

The unit also supports DVin and DVout which is quite unusual on a camcorder of this price. What that means is you can download a clip to your PC, edit it and record a nice soundtrack and then record it back to the camcorder where the sequence came from, clever little thing.
On the subject of streaming the video to a PC though, I would recommend doing it to a second hard drive if possible. When attempting to download my video to my laptop hard drive that was hard at work on other business too, the download became degraded and dropped frames from the video. What I do instead is plug the camcorder into the Firewire connection on my DVD recorder and burn it to a re-writeable disc and then take that to the computer for tinkering.

A bag is also required to protect your shiny new camcorder or else the finish scratches easily. At least because this machine is so small you don't need a huge bag. Shop around and find one to fit the camcorder, batteries and at least three tapes, be prepared to pay about £20.

In summary, a wonderful little machine but you must lay aside £150 extra for the accessories that are actually necessities.