Slashdot Mirror
Upgrading Hard Drive in Sony HDR-SR1 HDD Camcorder
clarkbox2 writes "Here is an interesting page detailing the cracking open of a $1400 camcorder just released by Sony. The pictures and text describe the opening of the outer shell, revealing the 1.8" Toshiba hard drive within. The HDR-SR1 ships with a tiny 30gb hard drive, allowing for four hours of recording in full HD. Great pictures showing the steps to recording bliss ... now where to get a battery capable of lasting for 12+ hours of full HD video?"
The article is a little short on details... all they did was removed the cover to access the hard drive. Oh well, its ecks-mass.
...in case anyone wants to know.7 336.asp?sid=G5120995
http://www.pricescan.com/electronics/items/item52
And here's its specs.
Yes, this is a mod without an actual mod. All they do is show pictures of the hard drive, and pine for an extra 1.8" hard drive. On one hand, if you spend ~1000 on a camcorder, what's an extra $240 to more than double the recording time? On the other, do you really want to take a chance that you might destroy your ~1000 investment?
Hard drive camcorders might be the wave of the future. However, removable flash based memory is also interesting, and avoids mechanical parts all together. 8 gig SD cards are here, though still expensive. The question is, will the convenience of having no moving parts and removable media outweigh the inconvenience of smaller media? Ultimately, flash (or some successor) will probably win. But in the short term, hard drives look good.
The Sony HDR SR1 has a serious problem, in that it records using AVCHD, which is uneditable by third party products at this time. Things should be better come spring (when Sony Vegas will support AVCHD).
This camera uses 4:2:2 chroma subsampling, and is therefor not 'true' HD. Although it is a great camera for the price they indicated, as there aren't any 4:4:4 cameras for under $10k
A larger drive would just extend the record time, assuming that it can be done. The problem is that page is at best just exposing the drive, no attempt was made to upgrade the drive, so there's no way to know that it would be accepted without hacking the firmware.
That camcorder is a little ahead of the curve, editing the file format that it records is a pain, you'll need to transcode it.
That reason is the motion artifacts and image noise that seem to go along with the AVCHD format. And that's just *one* of the reasons why, instead of buying an HDR-SR1, I paid an extra ~$1200 for a Sony HVR-A1U that does not only standard DV and HDV but also DVCAM format.
I lust after the time savings of being able to bang a camera hard drive's contents into a computer at faster-than-playback speeds, but I also like the fact that DV tapes give me an original archive of what I've shot, and for at least the next few years it's likely that DV and HDV (and DVCAM and DVPRO) are going to be the dominant formats for prosumer, event, and a growing amount of ENG video.
OTOH, if you don't know what DVCAM, DVPRO and ENG mean, you'll probably be happy with the SR1. I would strongly recommend it over the similarly-priced DV-tape HC3, which has neither mic nor headset jacks. (Hint: *always* use an external mic to keep from picking up the camcorder's own mechanism noise -- and noise from your finger/hand movements if you're hand-holding the thing. Or your breating if you're 1' away from the back of the cam and trying to get clean sound from a person 10' away in front of it.)
Four hours of recording time is a LOT if you're going to be doing around-the-home and local shooting where you can unload the cam into a computer every day (and you have major HD space on the computer). The biggest on-camera battery you can buy for that cam will go about five hours, which is barely enough to get 4 hours of actual shooting.
I have never shot more than four hours in a single day, myself. In general, I think you will find that for most home, semi-pro, training video, and indie film use, you will rarely (if ever) shoot much more than two hours per day, so a 4 hour HD on the cam ought to be plenty for most people.
- Robin