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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.
You had hard drives?! In *my* day, we stored our data in huge magnetic drums. And we liked it!
Looks like the camera was designed to allow this kind of "hack".
What next, are we going to get an article about adding RAM to an HP laptop?
Maybe the 30G drive is just in there to keep the price down. But maybe it's part of the overall system design--a good compromise between battery life, size, weight, robustness, etc. So, I wouldn't blindly assume that putting an 80G drive into the device will make a better camcorder.
Note that the 80G drives that the article mentions are found in iPods are actually in iPods that are substantially thicker than the iPods using 30G drives.
"now where to get a battery capable of lasting for 12+ hours of full HD video?""
See that jack labeled "DC-in"?
Google "Battery Belt" and knock yourself out.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
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).
Does it exist for playback and/or editing?
JVC makes 720p HDV camcorders. They are not hard drive based, but if you are recording straight to a notebook computer, then you wouldn't need to use tapes.
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