Sony DCR-TRV19 Mini-DV Camcorder Camcorder Best Buys

Sony poor quality / customer support - 10 Mar 2005

2 out of 2 found this review helpful.

trv19 poor quality, after 3 months i had 3-4 hours of taping. it stopped recording, no image in lcd and viewfinder. bad ccd block. I contacted SONY, they told me they would fix it for a flat rate of $216.00 this is after speaking to 3 managers. It was $276.00 when I started. SONY support will not help or work to resolve a defective product. I will not purchase Sony products in the future.

Follow up - 27 Dec 2004

0 out of 0 found this review helpful.

You may remember I reviewed this before and mentioned the tape heads being weak. Well, 3 months after I purchased it the tape heads are now damaged and need replacing. I got a lot of use out of it, recorded probs 15 hours of footage but still, classic sony reliability. I am reducing my rating to 4. Great camcorder but some people are just unlucky! haha.

Unbeatable Value for money - 24 Jul 2004

15 out of 15 found this review helpful.

When I bought the TRV19 I was astonished with the number of features it had considering the amount I had payed for it.

Video Quality:

The video quality is absolutely fantastic for an entry level camcorder. The image is very crisp and colour depth is not bad. Images appear a lot more vibrant on the LCD display though than they actually are. This isn't too bad as most editing software you get on PCs allow to configer saturation and various other values when you save it.

Sound Quality:

Yet again, for an entry level camcorder it isn't bad at all. It can record in 16bit stereo which is fantastic quality although the standard on the tape is 12bit which yet again isn't bad. Most camcorders only offer mono recording or 8bit audio so this is a major step up from those. Voices are very clear and you don't get any whistling from strong winds. Also, I happen to record very amusing footage with friends and accidentally laugh quite a bit when recording. However, the camcorder doesn't normally pick it up which is a plus.
If you want to be more professional I would recommend buying one of the many microphones that fit in it's Intelligent shoe located on the top of the camcorder.

Effects:

Now personally, I don't use these much at all as I can edit the tape on my PC. I have used some of them though and they are incredibly easy to use. Just navigate through the touch screen menu and select the effect you want and you're done within 20 seconds.

Battery Life:

One of the TRV-19s very few downfalls is the battery life with the supplied battery. You get about an hour and a half recording time if you really conserve that energy and use the LCD display as little as possible. I bought a QM91 which is the high capacity battery for the model and it lasts up to 852 minutes without the LCD display and 631 minutes with. That's over 14 hours without the LCD display and almost 11 hours with it! That is more than most people will EVER need seeing as how the standard tape holds 60 mins in SP and 90 mins in LP. It's useful though if you are repeatedly watching the tape and showing your friends clips off the camera.
The camcorder displays the amount of battery you have left in minutes so you know exactly how long you have left with that battery. Very useful.

Night Vision:

There are good and bad points to this. It's a very fun feature and I use it a lot. The image quality is not bad and allows you to shoot in perfect darkness which is very nice. However, the range is only 3m/10ft so you can only shoot up close in nightmode. You can increase the range with the infrared lamp you can get for the intelligent shoe. It's quite large though and makes the camcorder a bit harder to use as it becomes quite bulky. However, it increases the range of nightmode to 100ft making it much more useful and close-up images brighter and clearer.

S-Vid out:

The camcorder has composite video outputs on it for those of you who don't have S-video on their VCR. However, if you do and want to send your recordings straight to tape instead of to your PC then S-video allows you to do this at very high quality. It is also very nicely positioned on the front of the camcorder making it easily accessible.

USB:

USB isn't fast enough to transfer very high quality video so is not used to transfer your tape media normally. However, you can use it for transferring pictures from the camcorder and to use the camcorder as an amazingly high quality webcam! I am normally in complete darkness in my room (Classic teenager) and frequently use the night-mode when have a webcamming session with friends late at night. Due to it's excellent image quality and frame rate you get a very smooth result over broadband. Also, it has a built in microphone which you can use as well over MSN so you can use it as a video phone!

Firewire:

If your PC doesn't have firewire I recommend buying a PCI firewire card as soon as possible. It is invaluable. Do not buy a camcorder with USB2 instead of firewire. The results normally aren't as good as USB2 is faster than firewire but doesn't have as much bandwidth so firewire can transfer larger amounts of data at a time.
It allows you to transfer the video digitally to your computer without any loss of quality and it looks outstanding when uploaded to your PC via firewire. Keep in mind you need the software to do this. You can use Windows movie maker but I am not a big fan of it.

Long Term Issues:

Here is another apparent con to buying a Sony product. Sony are well known for supplying products that work amazingly well for like 6 months but break down soon after. The Playstation 2 is so unreliable it's unbelievable. All my friends have had issues where their PS2 can't play DVDs or stop working entirely. I have friends with Sony phones that don't work correctly any more. I am hoping this is not the case with this camcorder.
One of the issues I've heard is that the heads that read the tape can become damaged rather quickly if you use it a lot. They can be replaced but I have no idea how much this costs. I am guessing rather a large amount as Sony are well known for charging ridiculous amounts for repairs.
I have also heard of the firewire port on the device failing on multiple camcorders. It is rather worrying as I do a lot of filming and really hope that this camcorder lives as long as possible as they are not cheap to replace!

Ben Stretton

Top Notch First Time Buy! - 13 Mar 2004

5 out of 5 found this review helpful.

I Bought The TRV-19 to take on Holiday to New York with me and also to take to Uni as a camcorder to make small films on for my course! The Picture and Sound is pretty darn good indeed and the connectivity between camcorder and laptop or camcorder and tv is sooo easy even my mum could figure it out.
The touch screen is superb though greasy finger marks often annoy lol! Battery life is rather good but gettin an additional larger camcorder certainly helps!
Over all am very chuffed with it indeed

Highly recommend

Non expert view - 20 Jan 2004

18 out of 18 found this review helpful.

This camera is perfect for anyone new to digital camcorders. Why pay more for higher spec makes when you can do all your editing on your PC with a fairly basic editing software... take the plunge and buy one!