Sony Handycam DCR - DVD300

This is one terrific Camcorder. Sony really challenged their best engineers and they came up with a DVD camcorder that is a technological tour-de-force. They took all of the best features and innovations up and down their very successful Handycam camcorder line and incorporated them into this model. From the Carl Zeiss zoom lens to the Super Steady-Shot, Super Night Shot, InfoLithium Battery System, and bullet-proof optical drive system, Sony pulled out all of the stops to make this one of their most advanced yet easy to use DVD camcorders.

The real beauty of this camcorder is how easy it is to create digital movies by totally bypassing the intermediate step of moving digital data from tape to the PC hard drive by writing the digital information directly to 3” DVDs. These discs (after finalization) will play with no problems in most PC and consumer DVD drives.

Say good-bye to fast-forward and jammed MiniDV tapes. It is impossible to accidentally record over a previously recorded scene. You can access any point of the recording by using the random access navigation. Want to record? No problem. After turning on the camcorder it automatically starts recording right where you left off.

One really nifty and USEFUL feature is the VR mode. You can choose to use the VR mode whenever you start a new miniDVD recording. If you enable VR mode, you can edit the disc and easily create playlists of all of the scenes you have recorded. You can even change the order of the scenes in the playlist. This is a very powerful feature as it lets you edit your video compositions ON-THE-FLY.

By using the Mini DVD RW discs, you can fill those discs up and dump the video to your PC via the USB 2.0 connection and then re-use the disc over and over for additional video recording sessions. You can also aggregate the videos and burn them to a larger 4.7 GB DVD blank disc on a desktop or notebook PC.

As Sony camcorders go this one is built like a tank. It has the heft and feeling of solidity and quality that one would expect from Sony’s top-of-the-line model. The internal chassis of this camcorder is very rigid to ensure that the vibration from the optical transport motors are kept to a minimum and to prolong the operating life of the optical drive systems. The outer case styling is unique as form follows function but the silver with lavender blue accents makes for a handsomely styled camcorder.