Sony DCR-DVD650 DVD Camcorder

Purchased this camera for my wife last month, and have since taken a vacation, and recorded several family gatherings. The video quality this camera gives is wonderful, and creates a steady image, even with my shaky hands. The zoom range is impressive as well. Still images were great during the day, and the camera is FAST. It captures the image almost immediately, better than our stand alone digital camera. The focus isn't always dead on when you move the camera around quickly, but it recovers well enough. The reason for the 4-star rating is that this camera didn't offer a lot in the area of night time picture taking and video capture. The video leaves less to be desired, as the lenses capture enough light to make sense of what is going on, but the camera is not usable at night. Now that may have more to do with the fact that I haven't figured out better settings, or am just completely missing a flash feature I haven't seen, but in either case, I still need to carry around my digital camera for night shots. As a video camera, this product blows everything out of the water that I have ever used in the video quality department. All in all, I am happy with my purchase, and will maybe find that the one shortfall with the product is in fact a problem with the user (me) and not the product.

I've had this item for approximately 6 months and am just now getting into doing reviews. Below are my thoughts on the Sony DCR-DVD650 Handycam Camcorder:

Pros:

Nice design

easy to use

great viewfinder

able to take still pictures in addition to the video

option to use DVD or Memory Stick for recording/photos

Cons:

DVD's on standard quality will only record for 30 minutes-this is not ideal for those wanting to record their childs play, or a graduation or anything that may last longer than 30 minutes. For this you would need a large memory stick to accomodate then you can use your home PC to put the recording from the memory stick to a standard sized DVD.

As expected the digital zoom gets "grainy" in appearance when you zoom in close to the maximum allowed. This is tolerable, but just realize you aren't going to get as good a picture of something you are zooming in on as you would get if the image was actually closer.

All-in-all I am extremely happy with the purchase and think that it is possibly the best buy in its price range. I would purchase it again in a heartbeat. With that said, the day I win the lottery or have a lot of money to spend I'm sure I'd purchase a more expensive model with slightly better zoom and built in memory in addition to the DVD recording capabilities.

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I just bought this camera to replace my old Hitachi camcorder and this camera is awesome. The video quality is great the sound is excellent and it is Mac compatible for those who may be wondering it will work on imovie. But this camera is lightweight and the discs do not need to be finalized before you put them in a dvd player or import them to a computer, you just hook up the usb cord and import the video quick and easy. It does come with it's own software that is only compatible with windows which I dont have so I dont know if its any good.

But so far I am very pleased with this camera perfect for anyone who loves to film themselves and edit the footage. Really good buy for a great price.

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If you have been confused by conflicting claims about whether or not Sony camcorders are compatible with the Mac OS, this is what our experience shows. We are MAC users and bought this, in part, based on reviews that while the included software by SONY does not support the MAC OS (nor does SONY claim that it does), that I-movie would recognize the camcorder and file format used by this recording device. Alas, when we first connected the camcorder to our MAC, it did recognize the camcorder but did not recognize the file format (MPG) as a movie format, hence we could not open our recordings and edit them. After some further research, we discovered that Leopard software works with this format while Tiger cannot. Moreover, freeware video conversion programs like Handbrake, are no longer being supported for Tiger OS.

I did not try, but suspect, that upgrading to Quicktime Pro or its MPEG add on may resolve the issue.

As for the camera, it is compact, the touchscreen is convenient and relatively user friendly but the menus are not completely intuitive. As I received the camera shortly before having to use it, I ran it on the easy mode automatic settings. Standard Play (SP) seemed to produce better quality than High Quality (HQ) settings, oddly enough, but that may have had to do with ambient lighting. The battery lasted a good two hours with the LCD screen active. A 4 GB memory stick holds a little over an hour of recording, as advertised. The quality of the image and sound seems very good for this price point.

Our first camcorder, also a Sony, did very well for us and still works, but it is over ten years old and we wanted something that would allow easy conversion to digital format for sharing on line or on DVD. I look forward to learning more about this camcorder.

That said, I now find myself being forced to upgrade to Leopard OS if I want to use this camcorder as I intended. This essentially adds . to the cost.

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This camcorder was a present for my husband. It was a second try--I had ordered another make camcorder for him previously. He is not the most technologically-savvy guy--and it was not the product for him. The Sony Handycam was a lifesaver! It's easy to understand and easy to use. He loves it and that's the most important thing to me.