This is unacceptable in a brand new product. I have sinced checked other review sites and found another consumer who had the same problem with their brand new Sony! This really makes me lose confidence in this company. I returned my camcorder today and will keep looking.

Excellent Comcorder!!!!!!! (Rating: 4.00)
Review : Being a loyal sony fan i refused all others brands without having a sight on them and bought this Camera as it best suits my budjet and uses...So far it works fine and there is no problem with the camera and beleive me that this camera has an excellent picture quality on Tv, Unfortunately not on Computer wether you use firewall or usb it has not very impressing quality...Software with it is just a junk as even though after a month i don,t know how to transfer videoz to my computer and yes it uses a lot of system resources and will crash your system if you are sufring from low memory or slow speed...Fortunately i am using sony pc with softwares like movie shakera and Dv capture which works very fine ...i would suggest sony to bundle this software into this package...Stills are perfect for emailing but you will be disappointed with the resolution this camera offers..Camera has a lot of usefull functions such as easy hand cam button which is perfect in situations where u don,t know which settings to use...One thing missing is audio out and firewire cable ( i think firewire should be provided within package as it does,t make sense to use comcorder with such an important thing)..Battery life is good ..Overall excellent camera..Buy it now as sony products are designed with state of the art technolgy...I am very impressed with sony products.

its good but not the best (Rating: 3.00)
Review : i bought this camera a month back, and found video quality is uncomparable but stills are not upto mark. i am a professional vidographer and editor in INDIA and purchased this camcorder for professional use but disappointed in stills.
software supplied are a total waste excluding still transfer from cam to PC with USB cable. i dont heard any motor noise as others had.
for night picture quality is not very good.
in total the camera is good for daylight but not for nights.
manish, Ranchi, Jharkhand, INDIA.

medium quality (Rating: 2.00)
Review : In short, this is a medium quality camcorder. The picture quality is not great, the recorder is picking up the motor noise and still images are completely useless.

The AUTO mode takes the picture or video very dark. You need to adjust the exposure for better picture or video.

You cannot do anything about the recorded motor noise. it is always there

You cannot print the still images taken with this camcorder (even in 4x6). So if you buy this for the still image,dont wasteyour money and choose with better or theonew/o still pictures.

The features are very limited per the canon zseriesof camcorders. Optical zoom is 10x, which is very limited in compare to 20x (Canon)

The software works but the VCD creation is very slow with the provided SW.

So in short, this camcorder does not deserve what is costs.

Great Camera, Not Great Software (Rating: 4.00)
Review : I've been into DV for over a year now, I worked for a huge media site that did a lot of video crunching and encoding. So I'm not use to this bundled software. After a while of getting into the video editing again, I finally got the quality to come out good.

The thing that is important is deinterlacing the video if you're going to watch it on the PC. I couldn't figure out how to do this in the software bundle they gave you, and it didn't come out with a good resolution. So I went to www.adobe.com and downloaded Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, which is their newest version and is a great version.

Once I used that to capture the video and also used the deinterlacing features to deinterlace the footage, it looked great. The resolution is 720x480, which is standard DV resolution.

The reason I give this package 4 stars is because of the software bundle. It would be hard for a novice person to actually get this working.