Sony has announced a replacement for the highly popular three CCD DCR-VX2000, the DCR-VX2100. The DCR-VX2100 is a prosumer camcorder aimed at serious hobbyist and professional videographers. It's predecessor, the DCR-VX2000 had an outstanding reputation for video quality and and reliability. The DCR-VX2100's biggest upgrade is increasing the low light performance which is coupled by many small, mostly aesthetic upgrades. Sony's being smart in 'not messing with a good thing.'
The zoom on the DCR-VX2100 remains at 12x, controlled by a large zoom rocker, and the camcorder still includes a manual focus and a manual zoom ring. All the same manual controls, including the ND filter button on the side are on the DCR-VX2100 as were on the DCR-VX2000. The technical specifications of each CCD have stayed the same with 380K gross pixels and 340K effective pixels for video. Each CCD is 1/3 in. in size. Yoshi Nishimura, Camcorder Product Manager for Sony stated "The CCD specifications are the same, the only difference is that we improved the sensitivity of the CCD itself. The improvement was made by improving the process in making the CCD... Since we've been making the CCD for more than a couple of years, the CCD factory was able to improve the sensitivity so that we can change our low light capability from 2 lux to 1 lux."
The DCR-VX2000 had a professional equivalent, the DSR-PD150 which recorded to DVCAM tapes and included XLR inputs. Sony Europe announced the replacement of the DSR-PD150P (the European version of the DSR-PD150), the DSR-PD170P at the International Broadcasters Conference in September. Sony Camcorder Spokesperson Rosemary Flynn stated "At this time the US has no official information on the NTSC version." in regards to an NSTC (US) version of the DSR-PD170. However, because the DCR-VX2100 is effectively the same camcorder as a would be DSR-PD170, and the European version of the camcorder has already been announced, we can very confidently speculate that a DSR-PD170 will hit the US market within the next month or two.
The Sony DCR-VX2100 will be available in December for $3,000.
Today at CES Samsung announced a new high definition flash camcorder, the SC-HMX20 ($999 MSRP).It has a 6.4-megapixel CMOS sensor that also has a stunning 8-megapixel still camera capability. It can also shoot what’s called super slow motion at 300 frames per second. Wow. That’s enough to help me with my golf swing or those overdue balloon bursting physics experiments for school.
An SDHC/MMC card slot is built in to increase recording time. Samsung has implemented a 300fps slow motion feature that allows true slow motion capture of up to 10 seconds. This feature strikes a similarity towards Sony’s Smooth Slow Record function, which records three seconds of footage at 240fps. The SC-HMX20 has a 2.7-inch wide touch screen LCD display, another familiar Sony standard. The SC-HMX20 is PictBridge compatible and features Component, S-Video, Composite, and HDMI outputs.
