Digital Trends

Have tape- and DVD-based camcorders gone the way of the VCR and the cassette Walkman? It sure looks that way, as we’re pretty hard-pressed to find a super cool model featuring those media types. And how do you beat something like Sony’s high-def HDR-XR500V, with a 120GB hard drive, 6-megapixel CMOS imager and GPS map tagging? It’s tough. The XR500V is definitely not cheap, at $1,299, and is far from perfect, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s see what state-of-the-art looks like in the consumer camcorder arena.