Next Up: High-Def Camcorders
Photograph: Marc SimonYou've oohed and ahhed at the rich, lifelike colors and eye-popping sharpness of high-definition TV sets. Are you ready to see similar superhigh-quality images coming from your camcorder?
Sony's new HDR-HC1--shipping as of July--records HD video in 1080i format, with a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, or six times the resolution of the camcorders we looked at for this story. Though slightly larger than the cameras that we tested here, it's one-third the size of Sony's previous HD model, and at $1600 it costs less than half as much. (You can read more details about this camcorder here).
There are limitations on what you can do with the HD video, however. You can play it on your HDTV, but you can't run it in your set-top DVD player because current DVD formats don't support HD. The next generation of optical discs will have this capability, but the two high-def formats it will use--Blu-ray and HD-DVD--are not widely available and are likely to be very expensive.
Video editing programs such as Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple IMovie support HD-video editing but require very powerful machines with prodigious memory and disk space to handle the strain.
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