Sony Dcr-sr45 Camcorders

The Sony DCR-SR45 is a lightweight camcorder with a weight of 350g (without battery). Its dimensions are 76mm wide, 77mm high and 113mm deep). Our review unit was in the usual slick silver and black design. The camcorder has a 2.7-inch wide touch screen and a 40x optical zoom. The zoom enabled microphone captures the audio clearly. Plenty of storage space is provided by its 30 GB storage space. This translates to 7 to 20 hours of recording depending on the quality setting. You can also store photos and videos to a memory slot thanks to a "hybrid stick" which offers a secondary recording option with a memory stick slot that can boost its capacity to 16GB.

The four buttons- zoom in, zoom out, home, start/stop recording are versatile when recording at low angles. It has 2 menu systems; a "Home" menu for all feature settings and an "Options" menu for functions available for video and still images like recording mode, focus and white balance. The dead centre record button lets you start off easily and the dial fits in line with the thumb. Power and activity buttons are above this. It also has a "Quick On" button, which moves it from the standby mode. The "stills" button is located on top. And rocker switch for the zooming lens which allows shutter free close-ups.

Good
All features are up to the standard.
It has a responsive auto focus and good white balance.
Clean appearance with sliding door on the side, where you can find a USB port, an AV out with included cable. Another sliding door on top hides the memory card slot.
"Nightshot" capabilities
Compared to SR65, it has a larger optical zoom.

Bad
The video quality is disappointing. It is unlikable if you are used to the clarity of a HD video. It doesn't look good even at highest quality setting until you scale it down to You Tube size.
It fails to counterpart mobile phones with maximum image size of 0.3 megapixels.
It cannot capture shake free images and for taking close-ups, tripod is always required as it lacks optical image stabilization.
Performance drop in capturing dim light images.
Sometimes the images are blurred even in LCD screen.

Bottom line
The DCR-SR45 is not better than other entry level cams. The image quality is reasonable but not good enough for most people. It is affordable, but there are even cheaper models with better performances. The total package is up to the standard except for the video quality. It is adequate for beginners and budget shoppers interested in MiniDV.