Sony DCR-HC18E Mini DV Camcorder

I bought it because it was the cheapest Sony camera I could see; I wanted to try some video work before commiting much larger sums to buy a serious camera.
It is a great little package and I don't know how they manage to put so much function in such a small space.
The software that comes with it is poor and not really up to what the camera can achieve. However I dfid shoot some scenes, get them off the camera and edit them with Windows Movie Maker (free with XP) and then burn them to a DVD with some free stuff that came with my PC.
Perfect for my current requiremenst and will see me well into the future.

I decided to buy this particular model of camcorder as I had read nothing but good reviews after doing a quick Google search, the Carl Zeiss lens was a big plus point and so was the touch screen controls, which some reviewers found fiddly, I however, did not, I love them, and I have big fingers and I would never touch the screen with sticky or dirty fingers so have not had any probs with the screen getting dirty.

So I duly hovered over the listing I was happiest about and sniped myself a bargain in the last 10 seconds.
I decided to get myself a DV cassette based unit because a friend had kindly given me their Samsung DVD based camcorder and I found it to be very annoying and time consuming. The battery life was short, no USB or Firewire port for PC interface and worst of all the DVD storage function is totally unreliable. You have to muck about for AGES formatting, finalising, UNfinalising, all for a puny 20 minutes or so of questionable quality video that only occasionally reads from a PC DVD drive, or even the camcorder itself sometimes AAARGH (I tried 3 different DVD drive equipped PCs ) Infuriating.
So I flogged it to cash converters who hardly tested it, and got this lovely Sony unit for only another 30 or so smackers.
It has never gone wrong(touch wood) I totally would recommend this unit to anyone who needs reliability and simplicity from a camcorder. Believe me, unless you are spending 200 or more on a hard drive equipped unit, you just can't beat these for value and durability. The lens resolves beautifully, especially on close ups, the operation of the unit in camera and play modes is perfect and the video results are very acceptable.
My only critisisms would be
1 The bottom loading cassette design is slightly cumbersome and a pain if you have the camcorder mounted on a tripod (you have to take the camera off the tripod to load a new tape, Grrr)

2 The zoom/wide function is too fast, which makes for nauseatingly fast zoom ins/outs, unusable when recording, handy though when lining up a shot prior to recording, the solution is, happily, to use the included remote control which does a MUCH slower zoom, which I have yet to test in camera record mode, (I will do that later today and update this review if I can)

3 The zoom lens doesn't seem to zoom very far, considering it's supposed to be 120x digital zoom, (I probably disabled digital zoom ages ago because it looks nasty) so the optical zoom is not up to much..
I wanted to film the moon one early evening so I pointed the camera at the moon and it was a tiny pinprick on the screen and when I zoomed in it was the same size as just looking at it without using the camera, maynbe it's just me being thick, I don't know.
Anyway to sum up, all minor niggles aside, a SUPERB piece of kit I really can't speak too highly of, if I lost it I would buy another or equivalent and would definitely go for another Sony, but on reflection maybe one that had side loading cassette and more powerful optical zoom. Hope this is of some help to you if you have read this far, don't be fooled by the hype about dvd camcorders, I used to work for a callcentre for the Dixons group and I know how often and how they go wrong. It's always the dvd drive/media which is horribly unreliable. Go for DV cassette or hard drive if you can afford it...Byee