First AVCHD hi-def camcorders due from Sony in September

More on Sony's first two AVCHD camcorders

What we know (or think we know) about the two new AVCDH hi-def camcorders comes almost exclusively from a Sony Europe press release, and if you wish to read that, we've published it here.

As you'll see, though, the release is a good few bricks short of a load.

What it fails to reveal is prices, due dates, the resolutions of the camcorders' different recording modes, weight, dimensions, supplied accessories and a whole lot more - but we've managed to get some of the answers and include them here and on the previous page.

What the release does do, though, is highlight a couple of "emerging" trends that do help put the products into a understandable context.

The first is the way in which HD TV sets are starting to establish themselves and promising to become the next mainstream TV standard. Sony supplies no stats, though, so to get a feel for just how significant that trend is, even in the UK, check out this HEXUS.headline - 'One flat-panel TV sold in UK every 1.7s in week B4 World Cup'.

Know, too, that, according to market researcher GfK, high-def TV sets were flying out the door even before the World Cup effect. The company reckons that around 700,000 HD ready sets (plasma, rear-projection and 26in+ LCD) were sold in the 12 months to February 2006, with a total value close to £1 billion.

HD TV is doing even better in Japan and north America, so you can see that there definitely is likely to be demand for camcorders that can shoot footage that will look great on all these high-res big-screen sets

The second trend that Sony highlights is the general move towards camcorders that use DVDs or hard disks. Rather simplistically, the company puts this down to the near-instant access that such systems offer compared with the rewind/fast-forward hassle of tape. But, even though that's not the only reason or even necessarily the main one, it's clear that non-tape camcorders are now taking significant market shares - something that's only likely to increase.

Now to specifics. The DVD-based HDR-UX1E features an HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) port and a component jack for playback through an HD TV set and also has USB 2.0 to let it connect to a PC. And so, too, we imagine, does the hard-disk-based HDR-SR1E, though Sony does bother saying.

HDR-UX1E DVD-based AVCHD cam (click for larger image)

Discs burned in the HDR-UX1E will playable, Sony promises, in PC DVD drives - though this requires the use of the AVCHD player software that's supplied in pack. AVCHD discs are also said to be compatible with forthcoming Blu-ray Disc PC drives and set-top Blu-ray Disc players.

Sony's Blu-ray-equipped Playstation 3 games console - still being slated for a November launch - will be compatible with AVCHD, too, the company says. However, AVCHD discs will NOT play in the current-generation of set-top DVD player found in a huge number of British homes.

The supplied PC software (Windows XP, we're guessing) will, it's claimed, make it easy to get video off of the DVD in the camcorder and onto a PC. The camcorder has a OneTouch Burn button that's said to work together with the supplied software to create and final a full-size DVD with a single button-press.

What sort of spec will be required to manipulate AVCHD MPEG-4/H.264 files, though, we simply don't know. What we do know is that a lot of PCs struggle even to play such footage, notably 1080 Windows Media HD AVI files. Check out the playability yourself by downloading some clips from the WMV HD Content Showcase.

Discs will be burned as ordinary DVDs if the footage is SD but as AVCHD-standard if high-def. The same software lets users of the HDR-SR1E get footage from camcorder's hard disk into a PC for editing and creating SD and AVCHD DVDs.

But there are some shared features we can be definite about. Sony's list includes an own-brand ClearVid CMOS image sensor; still-image capture at 4 megapixel interpolated (2 megapixel without); a 3.5in fold-out colour monitor; and a ring around the lens that can be switched to give manual control over focus, exposure, white balance and a few other things.

Sony makes big claims for the image sensor, reckoning that "its performance, even in reduced lighting, puts both camcorders in a class of their own". The sensor is said to achieve "exceptionally-high" resolution and sensitivity - without going into specifics. It's also reckoned to have an especially high dynamic range (no specifics given, either), so that detail in shadow areas is still picked up even when shooting in bright sunlight.

The widescreen-format monitor is also reckoned to be something special - "the largest on the market", with a colour range claimed to be "approximately 1.6 times greater than previous screens" (not approximately 1.5x, note) so as to "reproduce more vivid reds, lusher, richer greens and deeper blues".

Contrast on the monitor is also claimed to have been boosted by 1.6x - for blacker blacks and better defined colours. But no mention is made of whether Sony has addressed the problem that besets most (all?) LCD panels on consumer camcorders - the user's utter inability to see anything on the monitor when shooting outdoors in bright light. Oh and we also don't know if the viewfinder that's also fitted (at least on the DVD model) is colour or mono and whether it can display menus if the LCD monitor can't be seen.

Update - July 25, 18:33

Here (courtesy of a posting in the DVdoctor forums) are links for the specs (in PDF format) of these two products.

HDR-SR1
HDR-UX1

and for the new AVCHD.org site.