Sony HDR-HC9

The Sony HC9 was released in 2008 and is currently Sony's only HD camcorder that records to a magnetic cassette. The Mpeg-2 footage it records offers excellent HD video quality and is particularly edit-friendly. It won't guzzle all your computer's processing power either. Beware though HDV fans, as this format is well and truly on its way out and may soon take the HC9 with it.

Handling

It's no surprise that the HC9 is larger and heavier than the average AVCHD camcorder, as it has to make room for a MiniDV tape deck. In spite of its bulkier size, the HC9 has been carefully designed and well made, sporting a sleek, glossy black finish. In some way, the HC9 looks more like a camcorder than many of its AVCHD counterparts due to its protruding lens-hood. The lens itself is protected by automatic shutters, which open automatically when you flip the camcorder from Off to On using the dial to the right of the viewfinder. Most of the settings are found in the internal menus, which can be accessed via the touchscreen. Video playback controls are also on-screen in the HC9. The screen is bit small at just 2.7 inches (6.8 cm), especially considering that it's used for adjusting all the internal settings and for controlling video playback. The HC9 does, however, have a sliding viewfinder, which is very rare these days. The viewfinder eyepiece is a little tight, but it's much more comfortable than the viewfinder on the Sony HDR-CX550, released earlier this year.

The HC9 has a great range of connections. It has a FireWire port (in/out) so you can edit your videos on a PC (via the output port) as well as re-record footage onto the cassette. The HC9 can convert HDV rushes to DV when footage is transferred via the FireWire port. This is known as downconversion, and it allows you to edit footage on an older computer running Windows XP or 2000. A 4/6 FireWire cable is also included, which makes a nice change!

The HC9 has an HDMI digital output and a component analogue output for quick and easy connection to an HD TV. There's also an A/V output for compatibility with older SD TVs, plus a headphones socket and a microphone mini-jack for recording professional-style interviews. The Lanc socket is used for connecting a tripod with remote control or the waterproof casing.

Image quality

Like all HDV camcorders, the HC9 records videos in 1440 x 1080 pixels, which is a slightly lower resolution than AVCHD camcorders. We used a test chart to compare picture quality, and it's true that the picture is very slightly sharper on an AVCHD camcorder such as the Canon HF R16 (which films in 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution at 17 Mbps). However, the main advantage of using this 'outdated' video format is that it's compatible with all types of editing software, and that you won't need a top-notch, lightning-fast computer to edit it effectively. Here, video is recorded in the Mpeg-2 format, which can be easily edited on a laptop or and old PC with a 3 GHz processor. Anyone who's seriously into video editing can therefore easily work on desktop PC they bought a few years back without having to worry about upgrading.

Image settings can be selected and controlled with the CAM CTRL wheel, located on the side of the lens barrel. By default it's set to control manual focusing, but it can be assigned other functions such as exposure control or shutter speed. The HC9 also has a NightShot function for filming in the dark using an infrared filter.

The 2.7-inch LCD and the manual focusing wheel.

The Carl Zeiss lens has a focal length of 40-400 mm in 35 mm equivalent. That makes for an angle of view that's neither particularly wide nor too tight for filming given the 10x optical zoom. The optical image stabiliser works well at long focal lengths but doesn't have an 'active' mode to stabilise the image while you're walking around, a feature that's found in the latest Sony AVCHD camcorders.

Finally, the HC9 has a photo mode for taking pictures in 6-Megapixel resolution (2848 x 2136). There's a built-in flash and pictures are saved to Memory Stick memory cards (not supplied). Picture quality is pretty good but you'll get better results with a compact camera.