Customer Reviews:
 Great Little Camera August 18, 2008
I love this camera. It slips into a pocket and is amazing value. The HD shots are stunning in the right light and conditions. The two main downsides are well known - the auto low light is not great and the fiddly little control that you must move to navigate to change settings and view pictures is irritating. But overall it is a great value package - not least now that you can get 16GB cards at an economic price (eg Transend). Interestingly, I used a cheap 8GB Sandisk catergory 2 card with no problems even though the spec says you need category 4 minimum.
Very Satisfied with the HDC-SD9 July 22, 2008
I'm very satisfied with this camcorder. It's small, the video is crisp and clear and I like the features. I can get anywhere from 1 to a little over 2 hours on a 4 GB sdhc card depending on the video quality settings I use and about 90 minutes on a fully charged battery.
Some people have complained about their hand blocking the microphones but mine seem to fit just fine. My hands are not exactly tiny and they fit well.
The only downside of this camcorder is the low light video can be quite bad.
You can view video samples for this camcorder on my website at [...]
Eric
 Needs Improvement. June 29, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Pros:
Price.
Lightweight.
Compact and easy to use.
Good High level light pictures.
SD Card is located nicely and easy to access.
Sound Quality is great.
Cons:
Extremely! poor low light video quality. I mean POOR, Crappy, decrepid, lame, sub-par, not good etc, etc.
Bundled Software is crap.
Have to open the viewer to remove the battery.
Poor Still Picture Quality.
I almost returned this camera due to its poor low light performance. Not what I would expect from something that carries the "HD" symbol. I got this camera to document our new babies life and you have to know that things like family get togethers and X-mas are not going to be outdoors or even during the day time hours sometimes. The picture quality starts to degrade right just before dusk. Lots of grain in faces and video noise when the lights are even slightly low. During the day or with direct light on the subject...no problem. When I first got the camera it was almost dark, so out of the box, I was really pissed at how bad the videos turned out. Only after recording the next day did I even get close to true HD looking videos.
If you plan on any type of low light level recording, stay way away from this camera.
Pro's & Con's June 26, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Pros
Extremely small (fits in the front pocket of my shorts)
Awesome picture quality outside with good light.
3CCD
Great zoom
The best image stabilizer I've ever used on a video camera.
Really like that is uses memory cards rather than tape or hard drives.
Cons'
Low light performance is not good.
LCD is great but if you wear sunglasses it goes completely black.
I didn't think I needed a viewfinder but if you're inside somewhere dark you have no way to record without distracting the people around you.
Needs a good manual focus ring not a menu driven manual focus that's hard to use.
Poor low light performance.
There is a flash on the front of the camera that should be replaced with a led for the video camera portion.
AVCHD requires lots of computer horse power to edit.
Not a lot of software to view the .mts files with but Nero Vision 4 for Nero 8 Ultra works fine.
Definitely a great camcorder for outside daytime use but not great of dark environments.
 state-of-the-art camcorder June 25, 2008
This fancy (and tiny) piece of technology delivers all you can expect from a <1K HD camcorder. Indoor video quality is ok, outdoor videos are very colorful and sharp (on my 1080p 42' LCD). Great quality!! I cannot imagine that Sony offers much more for twice the price.
I also bought a 16GB memory card for about 75$. This is probably all you need for your family movies.
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