Sony Handycam DCR-HC32 MiniDV Camcorder with 20x Optical Zoom Review

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Transcript of Featured Review

All right, here we have the DHC32 Sony Handycam. It's a very nice camera. It's great for picture quality and zooming. It has a 20 optical zoom on it, as well as an 800 digital zoom, pretty impressive. The great things about this camera are its size; it's very small as you can see here. It's got an easy mode and an advanced mode that are pretty nice. It's very versatile. It's got a great little feature for shake, for camera shake, I'm shaking it pretty hard here, and it really maintains a pretty good image as far as someone with unstable hands goes. The one thing that I really dislike about this camera, so I'll turn it around here, it's got a touch screen for its navigation, so if I want to do anything like, you know, change the quality setting, film effects or anything of that sort, I have to go into this menu. I have to; you know, navigate and touch it like this. It's really quite a hassle and takes away from a lot of the camera, a lot of the active control that I always have to be looking at a screen, touching it, as opposed to be looking at what I'm actually filming. One nice thing about this camera is the docking station that it comes with. Its a little Sony Handycam station and you basically just set the camera right in there and it syncs up the computer pretty seamlessly. The package comes with a great deal of software that you can use for streaming video or just downloading the pictures that are on it. One thing that I don't like is the picture quality that comes with it. The camera actually doesn't even come with a card to take pictures. You need one of the Smart Media cards to take the pictures. But the camera doesn't come with those, and when you actually do get it and take the pictures, they aren't very impressive. I'd probably give this camera a 5 or 6 out of 10. It's really a pretty good camera as far as quality goes with the video and, you know, the features that come with it, but when it comes down to navigation and using the touch screen and some other simple things like that, it really just isn't worth the money.