Sony DCR-DVD905E

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Features
The Sony Handycam DCR-DVD905 incorporates Sony's new 2-megapixel ClearVid CMOS sensor, the same chip used by the company's DCR-HC3 camcorder. Its Carl Zeiss lens has a mere 10x reach; we'd have liked to have seen 20x on a high-end camera such as this.

Along with the fully automatic Easy mode, the DCR-DVD905 includes a full suite of programmed and manual settings, including manual exposure and focus. Particularly useful are the spot-focus and spot-exposure features, which let you use the touch-screen LCD to select the portion of your image that you want to set as a reference point. While this feature is somewhat difficult to access on Sony camcorders with smaller screens, it works very well with the DCR-DVD905's generously sized 3.5-inch wide-screen display.

The new Smooth Slow Record feature will be of interest to racing, air-show, and sports fans, as well as to golfers looking to deconstruct their swings. It grabs 3 seconds of video at four times the normal rate (240fps), resulting in a 12-second slow-motion playback of your subject.

The DCR-DVD905 offers Sony's trademark NightShot and Super NightShot infrared modes for low-light shooting, as well as a color slow-shutter mode for when you're willing to sacrifice frame rate to maintain the original colors and avoid the greenish cast found in infrared shots. There's no video light, but there is a flash for shooting stills.

As with its predecessors, the DCR-DVD905 records to 3-inch write-once DVD-R/+R or rewriteable DVD-RW/+RW discs. With the latter, you gain some basic editing capabilities, including the ability to split, reorder, and delete scenes. When you finalize the disc, the DCR-DVD905 can optionally create a DVD menu, complete with customizable title, your choice of four backgrounds, and thumbnails that you can use to navigate your clips on a stand-alone player. It can also create a slide show of any images on the disc.

A proprietary Sony hotshoe allows you to attach lights, microphones, and other accessories. One particularly cool option is Sony's Bluetooth microphone/receiver combo. Attach the receiver to the DCR-DVD905 and clip the microphone to your subject; the camera will record that audio as the center channel of the 5.1 surround sound. This could be extremely handy for, say, recording a child's part in a school play, as long as you're within the 100-foot range of the Bluetooth transmitter. The Bluetooth receiver also includes a headphone jack, a feature that the DCR-DVD905 lacks.

Unlike its predecessor, the DCR-DVD403, the DCR-DVD905 includes a Memory Stick Duo slot for saving still pictures. The camcorder can shoot still photos at as much as 4 megapixels (interpolated) or grab stills of as much as 3 megapixels while shooting video. The supplied composite/S-Video cable lets you connect to a television for playback or to record video from analog sources to DVD.

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