Design wise, the Canon is significantly smaller and lacks the obnoxious branding on the outside. The backside of the LCD of the Sony is littered with names and tags. One of which is the 10 Megapixel tag. This camcorder features a 5 megapixel sensor. Therefore, they are interpolating in the camera to try and claim 10 megapixel images.

Last, for a $1200 camcorder, they are sure stingy on the software. They ship the SR11 with the same software that ships on their $249 camcorder the HC52. I personally don’t think it is very good software for a $249 product much less $1200.
Rating: 1 / 5

The recording quality is great, and the focus has great improvements from the HDR-SR5 I used to have. I could actually put it into manual focus mode. The on/off switch is thinner, and in a more difficult position (no big deal).

Here is the main problem I was having with this camcorder (the reason for 1 star, because what good is a camcorder if it doesn’t record?):

The recording would abruptly fail with a blue screen that said “buffer overload”.

The amount of failures depended on the types of loads, roads & bumps I went over with my truck. If I had a “user friendly” load (medium weight, double trailers = minimum shakiness for the type of vehicle I drive), I would get maybe 3-4 “buffer overload” messages while driving at one speed (55 MPH of course, LOL). When stopping or slowing down meant a change in “environmental conditions” for the internal hard-disk, and along came the “buffer overload” messages. If making a right/left turn, BUFFER OVERLOAD… Climbing a hill, same thing. Sometimes if another truck passed me, it would fail.

If I hauled a super heavy load on a single 53′ trailer and went over the route that had the most bumps, I may as well not have brought the camcorder with me because I couldn’t get 3 seconds of recording out of it.

Some users experienced with this model stated that the reason for the buffer overload messages was the microphone sound was too high. This is apparently not the case as it is the fact that the hard-disk cannot tolerate the vibrations associated with it’s applications. When it comes to being inside a vehicle, or maybe the vibrations of high decibel sound produced from a live band, this camcorder has a serious flaw, and Sony engineers/developers have some work ahead of them, but they might not be taking it seriously, yet they known about the problem.

The solution I am hearing on different forums is that one could use a memory stick for recording. My question is that could one transfer video data from the memory stick to the internal hard-disk?

Otherwise, if a person is using this camcorder for use in a vehicle, airplane, live band, etc. I would seriously reconsider.
Rating: 1 / 5