So I picked up a Sony HDR-SR1 today at Best Buy since my old Canon ZR45 MC was really starting to show its age. We have a ton of family events coming up in coming months including a trip to Disneyland, a new member to my sister-in-law’s family, a close friend’s wedding that Myleene will be the maid of honor for and the list just goes on and on.

At this point I don’t want to upgrade unless it’s HD because I’m not going to buy a crappy camcorder and a good one will run pretty expensive anyways for normal SD. I also don’t like burning directly to DVD and tape is a pain in the ass. That leaves the hard drive option. I’d love a solid state HD camcorder but that’s just not in the cards anytime soon. This camcorder records in AVC format which is MPEG-4 basically. Editing software is not the most plentiful but there are options. Sony just announced some newer models that produce HDV on miniDV and some DVD models that produce AVC but no new hard drive based models that produce HD. The new AVC models don’t talk about increasing the bandwidth that they supply to the DVD so I’m guessing that it won’t be improved even if there is a new HDD model this year. I suppose I’ll leave it in the box for another day or two to see if there are any more announcements from Sony at CES. If I don’t hear anything I’ll go ahead and unbox it since they’ll announce any new offerings there for the foreseeable future. The SR1 also has the advantage that it has a manual control ring on the front and some other good inputs for things like shotgun mics and so forth.

I’ll show unboxing photos if I decide to keep it.