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Sony HDR-CX105E

Sony HDR-CX105E
  • Manufacturer: Sony (www.sony.co.uk)
  • Pros: Excellent sound and picture quality; solid zoom and focus performance; flexible storage options including built-in memory; good ergonomics
  • Cons: Uses Memory Stick not SD; limited lens aperture; tricky touch-screen UI
  • Price: £409.99 (£358.60, Amazon)
  • Star rating: 4

After Samsung’s HMX-H104, this small, squared-off Sony is a surprise. The company has frequent travellers in its sights for this one, and its form factor makes total sense. The HDR-CX105 is compact enough to slip into a jacket pocket and is free of protrusions aside from a bulky battery on the back.

Ergonomically, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. It’s fairly comfortable to hold, but the zoom and still photo buttons are too close together. The small, recessed video record button on the back also feels awkward given the size of the battery. Inside the LCD recess are covered mini HDMI and USB 2.0 ports, as well as a Memory Stick slot. The HDR-CX105 also holds 8GB of built-in flash memory, which seems miserly in this company.

Elsewhere, the power and multi-AV sockets are located on the right side, with a video and photo mode button on the top and stereo microphones underneath the f1.8-f2.2 aperture lens on the front. Inside, the maximum video resolution is 1,920 x 1,080i at 16Mbps, which is some way short of the 24Mbps offered by Canon and JVC, although it’s not such a deal-breaker in practice.

The biggest and most persistent bugbear is its touch-screen menu system. It’s horrible. Buried somewhere you’ll find all the settings, shooting modes and other tweaks you’d expect of a camcorder at this price, but finding them? Consistently? It’s tricky, at best.

Luckily, the HDR-CX105 makes up for these shortcomings when it comes to picture and sound. The Exmor lens and 1/4in CMOS image sensor do a great job of creating great, detailed images with good colour accuracy and very little in the way of digital artefacts.

The 10x zoom, though poor on paper, at least enables the auto focus system to cope well and we didn’t experience any real problems with sudden zooms or pans. Indoors, the HDR-CX105 acquits itself well too. It’s only in very low-light conditions that the lack of a video light becomes noticeable. Footage can be soft, but picture noise is lower than you’d expect given the camcorder’s other limitations.

This product is part of our HD camcorders group test group product review. Other products in this group are:

 

Canon Legria HF200

  • Editors ChoiceStar rating: 5

 

JVC Everio GZ-HD300

  • Star rating: 3

 

Panasonic HDC-SD60

  • Star rating: 5

 

Samsung HMX-H104

  • Star rating: 3

 

Toshiba Camileo X100

  • Star rating: 2

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