Sony’s World’s Smallest Full HD Cam Has Miniature Sensor
‘The HDR-TG1’s WOW factor tainted by MemoryStick format’
Sony’s diminutive new heir to the newly minted “world’s smallest Full HD camcorder” throne is the travel-ready silver titanium frame HDR-TG1. While Full HD (1920×1080, also known as 1080P) with a 1.3 x 4.7 x 2.5 inch body and $900 price tag would have seemed like fantasy just a short while ago, Sony made it real and gave it a horror twist that just one day after the launch already has potential customers complaining. Stealthy voyeurism in HD may have to wait a while more.
This is a memory card camera, but it can only use Sony’s unsuccessful proprietary MemoryStick format. While it ships with a 4GB PRO Duo Mark 2 card, using it in its most attractive role – as a travel/vacation cam - would most likely force you to buy extra MemoryStick cards, which just happen to be more expensive than (almost twice as much as) the norm. I can see this camcorder joining the pile of Sony products being boycotted by savvy gadgeteers who are dissatisfied with the lack of memory card flexibility.
The 1/5 inch, 2 megapixel ClearVid CMOS sensor is coupled with a 10X Carl Zeiss zoom lens. The sensor’s Exmor technology should reduce some of the noise originated in the really small sensor . The highest possible compression quality here is 16Mbps in MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 (an improvement over similar miniature models), for a recording time of 25 minutes on a 4GB card. In the Japanese press release, a slow-motion mode is mentioned but at the moment it is not clear what its exact specs are.
Surprisingly, the HDR-TG1 takes 4 megapixel photos (twice the sensor’s native resolution), presumably through interpolation. Stills can be snapped while recording. The face-detection system can identify up to eight faces and encodes the selected parts of the images with extra bits. The built-in zoom microphone records 5.1-channel surround sound.
Control is exerted through a joystick located on the back of the camera. A small zoom ring surrounds the joystick, within quick access distance of the camera holding hand’s thumb. The ring has, as can be deduced from the Sony launch video, quite a bit of response lag.
Sometime last year, Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute released a decidedly less handsome Full HD camera. While not exactly up to the standards of consumer cams (it can only be controlled through a web interface, as it has no actual buttons), it is smaller than the TG1, has a huge 2/3″ sensor, and advertises 9 stops of dynamic range. While no price is known, the Fraunhofer MicroHDTV is the real “world’s smallest full HD camcorder”.
The HDR-TH1 will cost $900 in May, and pre-order sales have already started.
Source: Softpedia News
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