Sony DVD Handycam does fair job of gouging

THE SONY DVD Handycam represents everything that's good and bad with Sony these days.

Instead of having to fritz with tapes, incompatible tape formats, converting tapes to DVDs and/or moving them over to disk for editing, this pricey version of a Handicam incorporates a DVD-R/RW drive. No fuss, no muss, video goes straight onto eight centimetre mini-DVD media. This media can be finished for reading by any DVD-R from $99 consumer players to in-computer drives. Good idea, user friendly, happy-happy. Of course, Sony has to throw in a couple of proprietary twists to put a bitter taste on the last bite.

Sony's DVD Handicam family is made up of three models. The entry-level DCR-DVD100 (list $899) is the no-frills version with a 2.5-inch LCD display and capable of capturing 640x480 stills. I've been working with the $999 DCR-DVD200, equipped to grab megapixel stills. The DVD300 ($1099) incorporates a larger 3.5-inch LCD display and some other minor tweaks.

Two types of 8cm media can be used. Write-once DVD-Rs are available in generic form and relatively cheap at around $2.80/disk, Sony-brand media is $8/disk. For erasing and editing video on the fly, Sony offers DVD-RW disks at $12/disk, and is not discounting for purchases in quantity. Right now, Sony is also the only one selling 'em as I haven't found generic -RW 8cm media yet. The smaller form factor hasn't shown up yet at the local computer shows, either.

As noted in a previous column, Sony-branded 8cm media is in short supply in the States. Only recently has Sony DVD-RW media appeared at the shelves of the local BigBox outlets. A 8cm disk holds around 30 minutes of video in standard mode and can be shifted into an LP mode to put up to 60 minutes of video onto a 1.46 GB disk.

If you do the maths real quick to compare Sony 5.25” DVD-RW media with 8 cm, the company is charging squeal! squeal! four times what it would for the larger media, a single Sony-branded -RW disk being around $3. Factor in that the large media can store three times the data (4.7 GB vs 1.46GB), and there's some serious gouging taking place.

Oh, and did I happen to mention that if you put in generic DVD media, the camera will tell you it prefers Sony-brand via a nice text warning message when it first goes in? How do you say "weasel" in Japanese? At least it didn't toss in a MemoryStick to load it down.

Stock battery life is good for 60 minutes, so there's enough juice to record 30 minutes of video and take 30 minutes to putz around. Larger (more expensive) Sony infoLithium batteries are also available in the aftermarket.

The Handicam weighs in at a little bit over 1.5 pounds. Not the lightest device on the market, but lighter than many of the previous generation tape-based devices. If you want ultra-light, you might as well stick to mini-DV tape format.

On the video side, it has S-video in/out and there's also an IR remote for operating the camera remotely if you want to stand in shots. Intriguingly enough, the camera does not come with a Firewire port. Instead, it has a USB 2.0 port for transferring data to and from a computer and its mini-DVD drive. Given that Sony was a gung-ho supporter of Firewire, it's an interesting omission. Through the supplied software, you can use the DVD drive to copy video from hard drive to blank media or to make copies of media using a PC as an intermediary - it's also usable to copy from VCRs to DVD media using S-video. The manual says you need the software to convert video for on-disk editing, but I haven't gone that far yet. I'm waiting for my review copies of DVD editing software.

In operational use, the DVD Handycam works practically just like a stock camcorder with a few exceptions. The DVD drive is "locked" so the disk doesn't just fall out. You have to press the release button once to get it to unlock, then a second time to open up the drive lid and pull disks in and out. "Finishing" a DVD-R disk for playback on a DVD player takes a couple of minutes and there's an ominous warning about not shaking the camera during the process. Finishing in the camera puts date/time stamps each video clip and the clips can be simply navigated using the buttons on a DVD remote.

Bottom line: Worth the money? Even with the price premium today, the advantage of avoiding tapes for catching video moments is a winner. It would have been a wonderful experience if it wasn't for the 8cm media games. If people want a definition of "proprietary," they need look no further than Sony. µ