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It is truly raining great camcorders these days. Right now is sort of the best time to look for HD, great in that the cameras are working well, but bad in that every two days, someone is releasing something different. Net, net, the current recommendation is get the HDR-SR12 if you want a serious camera with lots of capacity and don’t unload things much since it has a monster 15 hours of HD recording time, otherwise get the Canon HL-10 if you don’t shoot more than 2-3 hours and unload constantly. I’m actually more the later kind of person. Even on our standard definition 30GB SR100, I usually don’t have more than an hour on it because I like to shoot short clips rather than long, long things. The only thing giving me pause is the lack of a viewfinder in those high light situations like an outdoor soccer game. So if the HDR-TG1 actually works well, then it might be the real winner. Hard to say as the chip is a1/5 inch vs a 1/3.2 inch chip on the HDR-SR12.

In a word, we have the Sony HDR-SR12 which competes for image quality with the Canon HL-10, but has a 120GB hard drive vs. just a SDHC slot. The really great things about it are that it has a true viewfinder and a 921K pixel LCD screen that looks really great. So, this is bigger and heavier, but you get 15 hours of video.

To me, the viewfinder is actually a pretty big deal because LCD screens just don’t work in any kind of bright light. But, the Sony is big and heavy and the Canon fits in a pocket. The upcoming Sony HDR-TG1 is probably more comparable to the Canon HL-10. The HL-10 does have very nice manual controls though, so the lack of viewfinder and the SD card swapping compete with the 120GB and it is all there. Hard to decide really. If you mount on tripods a lot then the Sony is obvious, if you are more the casual sort that shoots short, then the Canon is the right way to go.

At high light level, the HF10 and the HDR-SR12 look very good although the HF10 is clearly sharper, but at low light, Sony has caught up with Canon in terms of sharpness and also compression artifacts and in really low light of 15 lux. It is close though. In terms of optical image stabilization, it about the same as the Canon. Maybe the 17Mbps that the Canon produces vs. the 16Mbps of the Sony is one reason the Canon has fewer artifacts. Also it doesn’t have aperture priority or manual shutter speed like the Canon for some strange reason. This won’t matter to the average person, but in funny light conditions like theaters, it makes a difference. Sony does support x.v.Color which adds 1.8x more color information for use someday when monitors can display it.

The Sony uses a 1/3.15 inch lCMOS chip and has the same video processing found on their DSLRs and high end camcorder like the PMW-EX1