Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony DCRSX30EL Handycam Camcorder With 4GB Internal Memory (2h 55mins) - Blue

We bought this camcorder in red last week. When you pick it up for the first time I must admit its a little disconcerting because its so light. For this sort of money you expect a chunky weighty sort of feel. Well if you can get past that you really do get a good camcorder for the money.

From out of the box to first use requires about a 2 hour battery charge. Once done its pretty easy to use the basic features. A touch screen on the LCD panel, which tilts by the way, gets you up and running without having to look at the manual. The printed version of which is short but a longer one comes on the registration CD supplied together with a media package for organising and transferring files to your PC.

Once you are ready to go the camera starts the moment you flip open the screen and uncover the lens with the built in lens cover. If you forget to uncover the lens it even asks you to do it. No waiting to warm up so you won't miss any hilarious camcorder moments or children jumping at you pretending to be monsters. From fliping the screen to recording is probably less than one second.

Battery life is shown on the LCD screen in minutes, I wish mobile phones would do the same. Zoom at 60x sounds impressive but in low light it suffers.

There are couple of accessories worth considering for this camera. A longer life battery, you get about 2 hours on the one supplied. If you are away from a PC a memory card would be useful to add to the memory. Although with only two hours recording on the battery a memory card is pretty useless without another battery. As for cases well the camera is so small and light you can get away with all sorts of different cases, Jessops always seem to have a bargin bin of camera cases which are worth looking at before they close down.

Overall a good camcorder for the money. Light, easy to use and transfer movies to the PC. Bad points, if you have big fat fingers like me the LCD touch panel can take a bit of getting used to, could do with being £30 cheaper, should give you better battery with it as standard and a DVD authoring software would be a good addition too.

my wife gave birth to our first children in may 2009. i wanted purchase a camcorder to catch all those firsts.

i am a sony fan so went for this item. The price was competitive. The optical zoom was better than other products. The fact it is a memory stick requiring product reduced the weight of it.

i know the picture quality could be better but for what i need it for it is more than i need.

While this camcorder is very small and lightweight (even more so than the JVC everios) it is much sub-par in image quality. Audiowise, the static noise isn't loud but it's more noticable than other camcorders in equal range. More importantly though, as mentioned, the DCR-SX30 delivers very poor detail and image distortion reminicent of e-tronics made in the early 90's. There's just much better bang for the buck to get from another brand, or a more expensive sony model. It has a very cheap toyish feel to it, and with performance accordingly. Delivers blurry colors and handles low light badly. Also: In typical SONY manner, you have to install their sluggish drivers to transer files to computer. Why not just get people plug-and-play products, like some other manufacturers do? If you get this camcorder and you are somehow happy with it, you most likely have never ever tried any other cam for comparison. If you have - I guarantee you will be dissatisfied. Now you're warned. This is NOT a 200£ product, more like a bargage-bin 25£ product, dead seriously. Sony staff - get back to your dungeons and do a major overhaul, because a happy customer is a returning customer. (I got such a distaste for Sony after this.)

Excellent camcorder, zoom is incredible and camera is so light and compact, easy to use with plenty of inbuilt memory, additional memory card recomended as it is very easy to get carried away, also spare/longer life battery is a good Idea when travelling abroad although I have also invested in a travel charger that also has a car adaptor.
Highly recomended.

I bought this camera a couple of days ago and overall i am very impressed with it.

I was choosing between this and the Sanyo VPC-CG10, although this was not HD like the Sanyo, i preferred the form factor of this camcorder. The 4GB inbuilt memory is fantastic and allows several hours of recording, IF the battery lasts that long! you get roughly an hour and a half of battery life on it.

Video

The Video quality is pretty impressive, you get a high quality lens and a whacking 60x optical zoom. when playing back on the small svreen it looks great, and i plugged it into my 32" HD tv and it looked pretty good, obviously hot HD quality but the quality is impressive

Audio

When i was testing it for audio it was unfortunately VERY windy and its expected to pick this up, without the stupidly high wind however the voice came out crisp and clear and by the road etc it didn't pick up the traffic too much.

Overall this is a camera i can easily recommend, just for holidays the camera is VERY small and when holding it my hand barely visible. the touch screen works great and is very self explanatory.

comment if you have any questions :)