Sony TG3E / TG1 HD Camcorder Review

Author: Asoka | May 15, 08

TG3E is what European call this thing, while TG1 for American. Price around $900 for the world’s smallest Full HD Camcorder 1080i (1920 x 1080/60i @ 16Mbps). It has also 5MP Still-Image function.

It records with AVCHD and also m2ts format, and up to 10x Optical Zoom.

Let’s check the review.

It uses touch screen.
If you love touch-screen technology, keep go on.
If you hate it, get another camcorder.

Touch Screen

Bottom Menus, lined up along with the lower bezel. It might be hard for some type of fingers to press the correct button without slapping the others.
The menu is not really user friendly as well; as for the image / video deleting process, it requires 7 to 8 steps, which most of digital cameras / camcorders only required 3-4 steps.
For UI approach, it requires 2 hand to operating the touch-screen navigation (but most of touch-screen camcorders are having this kind of bug as well).

Comes with 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo card, which is limiting the recording duration for 1080i into a short 25 minutes length only. Memory stick is also expensive, and looks like only Sony who loves to use it.

The battery life also bad. It’s only able to stay alive around 45 minutes - 1 hour with LCD on.

It’s not working well with Apple MacBook as well, since they don’t really compatible with AVCHD, the converting process by iMovie takes like 4x longer than the video length. It also has a problem with the Audio. Apple couldn’t export the video, along with the 5.1 Dolby Digital format, instead, it converted into 2 channel audio.

Not only that, for a 4GB AVCHD format inside this camcorder, could ended up as big as 40 GB in Apple Hard-Drive.

Rejoice Thou Windows Lover! The software from this camcorder, called as Picture Motion Browser v3.0 will transferring your data in a snap! However, it doesn’t support to play mt2s format.

It is lightweight, but compared to Creative Vado, this camcorder is not for your pocket.

Another Things

Has HDMI jack
Quick ON mode, either from sleep mode (2 seconds), or from complete shutdown (5 seconds).
3 Seconds Slow-Mo recording.
The 5 MP Still-Image Quality is okay, not as good as the compact Digital Camera.
Certainly needs 3rd party video editing software for gaining the full benefit from AVCHD format.
The memory storage indeed, it’s expandable, but again, since it’s a memory stick, it’s quite pricey.
$80 for the 8GB Memory Stick PRO Duo, and $220 for the 16GB.

This is the still-image comparation by engadget