Sony Handycam HDR-HC9 - Camcoder

The Handycam HDR-HC9 is the upgrade to Sony's 2007 miniDV camcorder, the HC7. With this 2008 offering Sony provides minor improvements over the award winning HC7. The camera retains its barrel-shaped form factor that houses the Carl Zeiss lens with 10x optical zoom. HDV footage with a resolution of 1440x1080 is recorded onto the miniDV tapes, standard definition DV footage can also be captured through the menu settings. The HC9 retains the same touch-screen menu based interface and offers a host of manual controls from white balance and infinity focus, to peaking functionality and colored outlining.


Pros & Cons

Pros:


•HDV is a standard format that all video software recognizes
•Plenty of manual controls
•Good selection of outputs including USB2.0, Firewire, Component, HDMI
•Great video capture quality
•Internal, automatic lens cover
•Black design is better than silver
•Better quality compression for MiniDV over solid-state media formats

Cons:

•Still limited to proprietary Sony accessories


More information

Specs


- 10x optical zoom Carl Zeiss lens
- 3.2MP CMOS sensor
- up to 1080i video recording
- miniDV tapes for storage
- 2.7" LCD touch screen monitor, 211K pixels
- Internal lens cover mechanism
- Records video with x.v.Color (need a compatible TV to view)
- Data ports: USB2.0, Firewire
- Video ports: Component, S-Video, HDMI

Differences between HC7 and HC9

Body - the HC9 comes in a black color while the HC7 is silver.

Memory stick support - The HC9 supports a memory stick duo capacity of 8GB while the HC7 is limited to 4GB.

USB support - for transferring data the HC9 uses a USB2.0 interface which is significantly faster than the HC7's USB1.1 interface.