Sony Handycam HDR-CX12

[ Music ] ^M00:00:02 >> Hi, I'm Lori Grunin, Senior Editor with CNET and this is the Sony Handycam HDR-CX12. CX12 is one of Sony's prosumer HD camcorders. This one happens to write two Sony memory stick pro cards. In a nice move Sony includes a 4-gigabyte card in the box instead of building memory into the camcorder. That's a more flexible solution because the price of the memory cards and memory is changing all the time. So, I happen to like that. Overall I really like the camcorder as well. This nice gradual slope makes it very comfortable to access the zoom switch and the photo button rather than rather flat design that a lot of other camcorders have. It's small enough to fit in your jacket pocket which to me is good enough and the tiny ones I find aren't as comfortable. Unfortunately, the trade off with making a rather compact camcorder is that you end up with a relatively small LCD. This is a 2.7-inch LCD which isn't bad under normal circumstances, but Sony uses the touch screen interfaces, so it's not quite big enough that it's terribly comfortable for use with the touch screen. One nice thing that this shares with its hard-disk-based cousin is this camera control dial which you can set at any point from manual focus, exposure compensation or white balance. For manual focus it's a very nice design and feels very comfortable when you're focusing. It shoots very nice video and does pretty well in low light as well. And of course it has a 12x zoom lens and a 5-megapixel sensor. Specs are very nice especially for its price. It also shoots very good video. It has a very nice dynamic range, saturated colors and it does pretty well in low light as well. There is no USB connector on this camcorder. You have to stick it into the dock to download your videos directly from the camcorder. You of course can take the card out and stick it into a reader. Overall it's a very nice camcorder. I'm Lori Grunin and this is the Sony Handycam HDR-CX12. ^M00:01:59 [ Music ]