Excerpt: You get what you pay for. The camcorder is reliable and steady but video quality is far from HD. My smart phone has a better picture and zoom, so I use it whenever I need a quality picture. There really is NO optical zoom and the digital zoom degrades the picture. Color reproduction is decent, better with white balance. No manual overrides. Sound quality is decent. Enclosed software is workable but has a few problems, like crappy conversion to avi or mpg (several videos ruined before I made backup copies). Still, for the price, it's worthwhile as a learning experience, as a first investment and to find out what my next step will be. I'm most disappointed by company support; the forum managers might answer your question but forget about getting any follow up, and the other people who read the forum were as dumb as me--so no answers.
Summary: I bought this product just for fun, and its features, I thought the 70X zoom would be great but need a tripod to use that part and can not track fast.
Good video quality but very poor still picture quality
y2g, Amazon
21 November 2012
Summary: It is a good camcorder for video shooting with good zooming capability but still picture quality is really very poor. It is too blur and judder.
Summary: Even set at the highest setting (HQ)the video is grainy. Audio is fine. Though just starting to learn the software, it seems fairly easy to figure out.
Summary: There are (2) specific problems I have with the Sony DCR-SX45: the first one is endemic to all LCD screens, glare, you simply cannot see what you are shooting, the second
Summary: There are (2) specific problems I have with the Sony DCR-SX45: the first one is endemic to all LCD screens, glare, you simply cannot see what you are shooting, the second
Summary: Great camcorder execpt for the zoom. It says, in the manual it has stabilising features but its very shaky when zoomed in all the way. Hard to get a focused shoot.
Summary: THe sony handy cam dcr sx45/L is a neat camera. It gives you a great zoom. You don't have to burn dvds on pc, but from you camera directly to the dvd burner.