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Oooh, aaaah! One of the advantages of working at a major electronics magazine is that equipment suppliers (or their public relations people) want you to play with their latest and greatest products (in their eyes at least), in the hope that you’ll be impressed enough to feature them in the magazine. T he downside of that is we tend to become at least a little blasé, if not downright cynical, when it comes to a number of the products we look at. It’s difficult to get excited about a new widget when you’ve seen plenty of similar widgets before – and the new model is just another variation on a theme. It’s difficult to get excited about a new technology which they claim will set the world on fire when you know full well there’s another technology just about to be released which will blow it out of the water. It’s difficult to go “ooh, aah!” over a product regardless of the PR hype which tells us we should have! Enter the Sony DCR-PC100E digital handycam. OOOOOH, AAAAAH!!!!!! We first told you about this little beauty (and little is the operative, as you’ll see shortly) back in the “Products Showcase” section of the January 2000 issue (page 53). That was written sight unseen, purely from information supplied by Sony. Even so, it sounded pretty good to us at the time and Sony must have liked what we said because not very long ago, when stock became available, they asked us if we’d like to have a play with the real thing. That’s why, not six months later, this little Sony is getting another run. We’ve had our play and we’re impressed enough to give you our “hands on” impressions. First, some background for those who might not have seen the original article. The DCR-PC100E is claimed to be the world’s first digital camera which combines both video and still photography. Of course, there are many other digital video cameras around from which you can extract a single frame and call that a still photo – but that’s always a compromise in quality. Review by ROSS TESTER The Sony camera uses the mini DV cassette format for video and still photos and/or Sony’s own “memory stick” for still photos. The memory stick supplied with the review unit was only 4MB which was somewhat limiting – only six hi-res superfine pics would fit – but we still managed to give it the once (or twice) over. Memory sticks are available up to 64MB which would fit 96 hi-res (1152 x 864 pixels) superfine images or 300+ lower resolution photos. A 256MB version is scheduled for release next year. The memory stick itself is tiny – just 50mm long, 22mm wide and a couple of millimetres thick. It plugs into a slot in the back of the camera. Speaking of tiny, so is the camera itself: 127mm high, 123mm deep and only 61mm wide (or 125mm wide with the integral colour video screen wide open). The camera is a delight to use, due not in small part to its small size and weight (650g including battery and Sony DCR-PC100E 4  Silicon Chip These three shots of God’s own country (ie Narrabeen Beach) show the camera’s still photo “zoom” capabilities: the top pic is at full wide angle, the middle at full optical zoom and the bottom at full digital zoom. tape). It’s very nicely balanced when held against the eye and is not unwieldy to use at full arm’s stretch (for example, holding above the crowd to catch a scene in front). This is made very easy by virtue of the fact that the LCD screen rotates a full 270° and opens to a full 90°. Want to get in the picture yourself? Simply turn the LCD screen so it faces forward and use the self-timer! Or use the full-function remote control unit: it will start and stop the camera, capture individual pics, adjust the zoom (wide angle to tele-photo), allow searching and much more. We were going to make a comment about how “touchy” the zoom buttons were on the camera itself – going from full telephoto to full wide angle in about half a second. That was until we discovered (OK, we eventually read the instructions!) that the zoom control was actually variable – barely touching it gives an almost imperceptibly slow zoom; the more pressure that’s applied the faster the zoom. We had been using it as basically an on/off switch, which it isn’t! Having said that, it’s a bit touchy and does take a bit of getting used to. Digital Handycam JUNE 2000  5 Two modes of zoom are offered: optical and digital. An indicator in the viewfinder shows the level of zoom with a line marking the switch-over from optical to digital. Digital zoom is often poo-pooed by the purists as it is a “synthesised” image and usually results in a noisier picture. But the photo series demonstrates the capabilities of this camera. The lens, by the way, is a Carl Zeiss 4.2 to 42mm, which equates in standard 35mm camera parlance to a 48-480mm (or 40-400mm in memory stick mode). Minimum illumination is 7 lux (equivalent to f1.8) but an infrared lamp is built in, giving the camera the ability to shoot in total darkness – zero lux – in “Nightshoot” mode. This is a pretty nifty feature for anyone interested in wildlife photo-graphy or even surveillance work. We found the Nightshoot mode very effective up to about 5m away, especially when coupled with the camera’s “slow shutter” feature. The camera offers a variety of automatic exposure (AE) programs to make life really simple for you. Or you can do the whole thing manually – including focus and exposure. Some of the AE modes offered include spotlight (for minimising glare), soft portrait (so-called “anti wrinkle!”), sports lessons (minimis- The camera’s natural light and night shots are superb: above is a typical room-level light AND shot at low resolution; the one at right was at high resolution but was also completely handheld (ie, no tripod) and at full digital zoom. Try doing that with a conventional camera! 6  Silicon Chip es shaking), beach & ski (adjusts for strong light reflection), sunset & moon (for sunsets, night shots, fireworks, etc), landscape (stops the autofocus locking onto close objects) and low lux (where there is insufficient light level). And there’s also a host of special effects you can add including sepia finish, art and even black and white! Want to add titles? There are eight presets to choose from and you can have them in any colour. Or you can key in your own if you wish. Most functions are available to both video (tape) and still (tape/memory stick) recording. One feature worth mentioning is the use of the “InfoLITHIUM” battery. This special type of lithium-ion battery exchanges data with the camera to indicate state of charge and expected battery life. Video recorder We’re going to concentrate on the still photo capabilities in this review, mainly because digital video recorders have been around for a while. That’s not to say we weren’t impressed with the video side: it is superb, offering a wide range of standard and special effects and features. The DCR-PC100E uses mini-DV cassettes (standard DV, super-8 and other formats are not usable). It pops into a door in the back of the unit. For some functions, especially search operations, a special mini-DV tape with “cassette memory” is required. Still photos as well as moving action can be recorded on the tape with an amazing array of search features provided including photo search and photo scan, searching by date, title and memory zero. Video cassette recorder The camera can also double as an advanced VCR, accepting input from either standard composite video and stereo audio (eg, a suitably equipped television set) or from S-video. The latter is particularly important has it has become the standard for high quality home video recording. What's more, because recording to the DCR-PC100E is digital, you can edit (eg insert scenes from other sources) into your tapes without re-recording the tape. Audio dubbing is also a breeze and, unlike most ordinary VCRs, the original audio track can be left intact. You can even adjust the audio balance between old and new tracks via an inbuilt mixer. Similarly, titles can be recorded onto your tapes long after recording them. Stills photography As we mentioned, we were most interested in the Sony’s stills photography capabilities so the balance of this review will concentrate on that aspect. Apart from giving you a range of special effects and options simply not possible on a standard (still) camera, a digital camera has a huge but obvious advantage: you can see what you’ve shot there and then, and if you don’t like what you have you can do it again. No waiting for the film to be developed and printed and then finding out that the bride’s eyes were closed... You can review any or all of the images recorded on the tape or memory stick and throw out the shots you don’t want. Especially in the case of the memory stick, this obviously frees memory so you can record new images. This is all possible through a very intuitive menu system accessed via a push-button panel revealed when you open the LCD screen and also via a wheel which normally controls manual exposure level (if you want it). Images can be reviewed and retained or deleted one at a time, or if you’ve really messed things up you can bulk-erase the memory stick. Once erased, though, the images are gone for all time. You don’t have a negative to fall back on! Saving to computer The other big advantage a digital camera has is its ability to interface with a computer. You don’t have to scan in pictures – they’re already in digital (jpg) format, suitable for PC or Mac. The review unit came with a serial port interface and a CD-ROM containing “Picture Gear Lite” software. As its name suggests, the interface plugs into a spare serial port on your PC. The software allows some degree of picture processing but we used it simply to download the images we’d taken and then massage the pictures in our software of choice – Adobe Photoshop. There were a couple of wrinkles when we first tried to use the interface and software. Even though it says it is compatible with Windows NT, after we (apparently) successfully installed the software, try as we might we could not establish a connection between the interface and serial port. So we moved the whole shebang to another computer containing Windows 95 and... still no joy. This time, though it was a lack of a spare serial port (you really do need that mouse!). Third time lucky? Yes! We went to yet another machine which had a spare serial port AND ran Windows 95, loaded the software once again and voila! It found the interface unit first time. To really test our luck, we then decided to try it out on a brand new Pentium III machine running Windows 2000. There was no mention of 2000 compatibility on the software but it worked perfectly nevertheless. What you see on the PC screen after connecting the serial port adaptor through Picture Gear Lite. It gives some editing and manipulation capabilities. (Incidentally, we’ve since tried it on yet another NT4 machine and this time it worked perfectly. Hmmm...) Note that you cannot erase or delete images from the memory stick in the interface unit. That’s probably a safety feature so that you can’t accidentally erase your overseas trip while down-loading! We’re not sure if we were doing anything wrong but we couldn’t get the pictures to download at anything but 72dpi – fine for viewing on screen, using on the ’net and emailing to your friends – but not for publishing. The images were 420mm wide so we resampled them to 266dpi and 120mm wide – a bit naughty, perhaps but the results are there for you to see. We understand that Sony are going to (or perhaps now have) release(d) a Memory Stick adaptor which slots into your PC’s 3-1/2in disk drive. Now that would be handy... Picture size Because the images on the memory stick are recorded with JPG compression they’re quite small. A super fine image at 1152 x 864 will be around 600 kilobytes, while at the bottom end a standard image at 640 x 480 will be just 60KB. Needless to say, you can’t enlarge a 60KB image much but for web use or emailing, small is beautiful and even smaller is even more beautiful! As we previously mentioned, with the 4MB memory stick supplied we could fit only six 1152 x 864 superfine images. But if you’re prepared to accept the lowest resolution and quality (640 x 480, standard) you can fit a very respectable 60 images. If you really need to shoot a lot of hi-res, high quality images on memory stick be prepared for a lot of downloading – or buy a larger memory stick. A 64MB memory stick will set you back around $429. Price And that brings us to the price of the unit. As we said in the January issue, the Sony DCR-PC100E is not cheap (in any sense of the word). It’s going to cost you (at the moment) around $4600. With the bottom fallen out of the dollar recently and GST commencing just a few weeks after publication of this issue, what the unit will end up costing is anyone’s guess – up or down! But if we were looking for an extremely versatile video recorder with a still camera thrown in, we’d find it hard to go past this one. Overseas travellers would find it perfect – small size, all the tricks you want and stills pictures to email back home! We said at the start one of the advantages of working at SILICON CHIP was that we get to play with new toys. We forgot to mention the disadvantage: having to give them back! SC JUNE 2000  7