A 12 year old Sony Handycam in 2020!

Released in 2008, the Sony Handycam DCR-DVD610 was a compact camcorder that retailed for $299.99 (according to an old Best Buy page: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-han...)

This was not a fancy camcorder but has an interesting feature which brought me to buy it back in March. It records using mini-DVD. Similar to the Sony Mavica MVC-CD1000 camera I did a video on a while ago which recorded images to CD - this one uses mini-DVD as well as Pro Duo memory sticks up to 8GB in size. (Sony Mavica MVC-CD1000 Video:    • Sony Mavica MVC-CD1000 - a 20 year ol...  )

The Sony Mavica MVC-CD1000 seemed a bit more versatile in comparison than the Handycam though. Getting your movies off of this camera is not as easy as it was to get content off the of the Sony Mavica. If you use a DVD-R or DVD+R you MUST finalize the disc to get your content. Otherwise using a DVD+RW is the better way to go as it allows you to re-use the disc multiple times. It does however put all of your clips into a chapter'ed traditional DVD format easily playable on any DVD player.

The quality of the footage was just OK, it is 480p, but you can tell the color is not very vibrant and is a bit dull. You have to up it to HQ setting for it to have any sort of sharpness. The mic is pretty good though and zoom was very impressive. You need an incredibly steady hand however as there is no stabilization on this thing at all.

To get the clips used in this video off of the camera I had to film using 2 Mini-DVD-R disc's (yes 2!) as each disc can only hold 30 minutes of footage (another downfall of this camcorder). I then had to rip them from the disc using a program called Handbrake (https://handbrake.fr/)

2 issues I had while using this camera were 1. When finalizing the first disc, it died even though it had 30 minutes of battery left (according to the camera's battery meter) but it still ended up continuing to finalize once I connected it to power. 2. When trying to film a clip it just died during the filming causing me to lose the entire clip, once it restarted it showed it as a corrupted file. It did try to recover the file but was not successful. That does not give me any confidence in the camcorder for important recordings.

Another note, while the camcorder IS capable of taking photos it will only do so if you use a Memory Stick, so even with a DVD it won't even allow the photo function to work.

Thanks so much for watching! Did you own this camcorder? Tell me about it in the comments below!

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