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Where others zig, Sony zags. In the past year, Sony has unleashed a flood of unconventional low-cost HD camcorder designs. Well, grab those galoshes again. Here comes another one.
Sony's brochure calls the HXR-MC1 a Digital HD Video Camera Recorder. Five categorical words that bring no specific image to mind. Sony's press release tries on the conventional label: point-of-view camera. But all cameras are point-of-view, at least by the laws of perspective.
Let's explore Sony's naming quandary as we take a closer look at the singular HXR-MC1 and see if we can't come up with better language to describe what might become a new product category.
The HXR-MC1 has three components: a camera head, a headless body, and a cable joining them.
The camera head, about 3.5" x 1.5" x 1.5", resembles a tiny C-mount box camera - the type attached to skydivers' helmets, Formula One chassis, and 7-Eleven ceilings. Except that it contains a fixed, built-in 10X zoom (no C-mount) and a stereo microphone that varies its directivity to "zoom" along with the lens.
Inside is a single 1/5in. CMOS sensor with a full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080, incorporating both Sony's ClearVid technology (pixels rotated 45 degrees, more green pixels) and Exmor (fast column A/D readout and dual noise canceling).
The headless camera body cradles in the hand like a fat BlackBerry. The cable attaches at the top like an iPod earbud cable does. Next to it is a small InfoLithium H-series NP-FH60 battery. At the center of the camera body is a 2.7in. LCD (211,000 pixels), and at the bottom there are camera controls including a small zoom-rocker switch, which I'll discuss below.
The thick black cable, 2.8 meters long, permanently attaches with strain relief to both camera and camera body. In other words, head and body are always tethered to one another.
This is why you could call the HXR-MC1 a snake-cam - a long, slinky black body with a head at the end - although I can see Sony's reasons for holding off on that one.
What about recording? The camera body contains a slot for a Sony Memory Stick Pro Duo or Pro-HG Duo flash-memory card to record 1080/60i AVCHD (MPEG-4 AVC/H.264) at 5Mbps, 7Mbps, 9Mbps, or...