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• The Good: Produces crisp, breathtaking HD images in optimal conditions. Excellent surround-sound audio quality. Light, durable construction. Direct HDMI output for full 1080p quality. Priced right at $999
• The Bad: Ridiculously short USB adapter. Some graininess and blurriness in certain situations. Puzzling pastel mode (unless I'm missing something). No HDMI cable included
• The Verdict: An affordable, easy-to-use way of shooting in high-definition
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Not so long ago, it was a big deal to be able to stuff a digital camera into a front pocket. Now, thanks to the Sony Handycam HDR-TG1, you can do the same thing with a high-definition camcorder. With a slim, pure titanium body (40 per cent lighter than steel and twice as strong as aluminum), the HDR-TG1 is being advertised as the smallest camcorder to feature 1920 x 1080 full high-definition recording with Dolby 5.1 surround sound. It's small enough to manage with one hand, and a 2.7-inch LCD touch screen is used to operate most of the camcorder's menu functions, contributing to a sleek and largely button-free exterior.

SLEEK AND EASY TO USE

The right thumb controls Start/Stop, zoom (up to 10x with a Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens), and a lever that toggles between movie and still picture mode, while the rest of the hand grips the camcorder's body like a pistol handle. The setup proved to be intuitive and easy to use while putting the camcorder through its paces.

The LCD is arranged such that you can access basic functions – playback and the Home menu – from the main screen itself, and can then delve further into the various menu and customization options as needed. There's also a useful QUICK ON mode for those instances when you need to power the camera on almost instantaneously to capture a special moment: If you close the LCD without actually powering the camera down, it goes into sleep mode instead of shutting completely down, so that you can open the LCD again to begin recording straight away.

MEMORY AND MEDIA

The camcorder records only to Sony's Memory Stick PRO Duo cards, which should come as no surprise since Sony has always enjoyed pushing its proprietary media. (SD compatibility would have been nice.) Nevertheless, if you own other Sony electronics like the PlayStation Portable gaming system, you'll be able to use the same cards. The full-sized Memory Sticks are not compatible except through an adaptor, which is not included with the HDR-TG1.

The camcorder ships with a 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo, which is a nice gesture, but will only afford around 25 minutes of recording time in the highest quality HD format the camera has to offer. Those who mean business will need to invest in 8GB or 16GB cards, which increase the recording capacity significantly.

In the camcorder's highest quality format (high definition AVCHD 16M at 1920 x 1080/60i), you can expect around 110 minutes of recording time on a 16GB card, verses around 355 minutes on AVCHD 5M 1440 x 1080/60i long-play format). The camera can also record in Standard Definition MPEG 2 format, which extends recording time to as high as 655 advertised minutes.

VIDEO AND AUDIO

As for picture quality, the HDR-TG1 performed relatively well indoors, although footage proved to be grainy in low-light conditions and there was occasionally noticeable blur as the camera's auto-focus kicked in and settled on new subjects. You have the option of manually adjusting the camcorder's settings, or applying pre-set shooting modes like Beach, Snow, Spotlight, Portrait, or Fireworks. Twilight mode seemed to offset a bit of the graininess, but switching to candle mode introduced a degree of blurriness that was almost unwatchable.

Other modes include sepia (for achieving that slightly yellowed old movie look), and a pure black & white mode. These were fun to play around with, but a third mode, pastel, seemed to merely white-wash the image. You can also apply white or black fades to the image that will automatically kick in whenever you end the shot by putting the camera back into standby. These were cool touches to play around with, although I suspect that any serious home movie editor would want to apply such fades via editing software.

Where the camcorder really came into its own was outside, yielding crisp, detailed and colourful images that were able to hold their own against any high definition broadcast I've seen. What was equally as impressive as the video was the audio quality. Voices picked up by the camcorder's microphone were crystal clear. I asked the subject I was filming to walk around me while speaking, and sure enough, when we played the footage back, his voice travelled through each one of the speakers in our Dolby 5.1 setup.

THE REST OF THE PACKAGE

The camcorder comes packaged with composite and component A/V cables, and a neat docking station that allows the camera to sit upright so you can swing out the LCD and review footage even while the camera is charging. On the downside is the ridiculously short USB charge cable and adapter, which is a foot if it's lucky. Also, while the camcorder is capable of HDMI output, puzzlingly there is no HDMI cable included.

Also included in the package are two useful pieces of software: a Handycam Utility for importing content from the camcorder to a computer's hard drive, and a one-touch disc burning utility. Regarding burning, the manual helpfully issues the warning that attempting to run DVD media containing AVCHD footage on a standard DVD player may cause serious problems, so it's preferable to play such footage on compatible Blu-ray players.

If you haven't picked up a Blu-ray player yet, you can still play the videos from your computer using the AVCHD video player included in the camcorder's software bundle, or connect the camcorder directly to a television.

There's also Picture Motion Browser, an application similar to Microsoft's Windows Photo Gallery that offers a way to catalogue video clips, adding labels such as Travel, Family, Wedding, and assigning star ratings, as well as rudimentary editing tools like video trimming. (It also decided to import all of the thousands of photos on my hard drive without being asked.)

AFFORDABLE HD

Although the Handycam HDR-TG1 doesn't perform equally across all lighting conditions, under optimal light (read: outside), it's capable of producing superb HD video with audio to match. For a sub-$1,000 camcorder, that's not too shabby at all.