Sony HDR-CX360V

Sony Handycam HDR-CX360V

Sony's Handycam HDR-CX360V should be the company's $599 camcorder offering, but I suspect is priced about $200 higher in order to rationalize the too-crowded product line. The good news is that if you work a little, you can find it for under $600, at which price it's a pretty good deal. Because for $800, it delivers solid, but not great, video quality, and an interesting but incomplete feature set. At its best, the video looks very good. In bright light, in scenes without a lot of detailed motion, it's sharp, relatively free of artifacts, with good color accuracy and exposure. But in scenes at midrange distances the video looks a bit soft overall, and there's generally clipping in the highlights. Like many cameras and camcorders, saturated reds don't render very accurately, and there's frequently significant blooming on the edges of very saturated colors. Despite a relatively high bit rate, you can see some blocking artifacts in highly detailed scenes. However, shooting progressive mode--in 60p or 24p--makes a significant improvement over 60i when it comes to edge aliasing (jaggies). The camcorder also does a solid job of maintaining exposure and color in low-ish light.