Rob Clymo: Columnist - Tech & Gadgets
The Clymo Brief: High definition holidays
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I watched in awe recently as the new Airbus A380 touched down at Heathrow. What a plane; featuring endless luxury, state of the art in-flight entertainment and copious amounts of space. Sadly, that’s not the norm. If you’re in the habit of searching for penny air fares on the internet, you’ll know legroom and other physical comforts are in short supply on many aircraft.

As for baggage, when flying with a budget airline that makes additional charges for anything bulkier than a spare pair of socks, you can forget it. Little wonder nobody brings straw donkeys or sombreros home these days.

Travelling light

The answer? Well, I prefer to travel light. One bag will do it. If I end up needing anything else, I’ll buy it en route then bin whatever doesn’t fit in my bag for the return trip. Mind you, I did recently spend an hour decanting suntan lotion into several mini hotel shampoo containers in order to beat the 100 millilitres ruling. Well, shame to waste it.
So it’s great how gadgets are becoming progressively more compact. Camcorders in particular are tiny when compared to the breezeblock-sized devices of a few years ago.

Which brings me to the Sony Handycam TG3E – currently the world’s smallest, slimmest and lightest high definition (HD) camcorder. This little beauty makes the perfect companion when you’re travelling sans baggage. Smaller than a fistful of euros, it slips easily inside a carry-on bag or jacket pocket. It looks a million dollars too, but retails at around £650.

HD heaven

Though small, this is a camcorder with big ideas when it comes to picture quality. With so many of us nailing enormous widescreen TVs to our walls, manufacturers are enthusiastically responding with products to match. The TG3E offers full-HD 1920 x 1080 recording quality, so your movie footage will look mighty fine once it hits that slab of LCD.
Getting to your destination with decent kit is one thing, but the big problem with camcorder footage is that much of it is rubbish. My recent experience in a Spanish hotel is typical. For starters, I had to endure an Elvis tribute act featuring an impersonator who looked as much like the King as I do. Worse still, I then had to look on as a drunken fat man in an England T-shirt swayed around filming the whole gruesome spectacle. I doubt there was much worth saving the following morning.

Feature-packed

Sony’s Face Detection feature turns this tricky business of movie capture on its head by doing a lot of the hard work for you. It automatically adjusts focus and exposure along with colour balance and skin tone. Perfect for half-cut Brits abroad really.

Other highlights include scene selection modes that make life easier if you’re a novice shooter or the sangria ends up being stronger than you’d bargained for. Just choose your settings, point and shoot. It’ll be in the can before you’ve hit the deck. Easy peasy.
Considering the TG3E is barely bigger than a mobile phone, I was interested to see how it would cope with camera shake. Sony claim it’s got something called Super SteadyShot and I expected that to be as much use as a chocolate teapot. But, as Bullseye’s Jim Bowen would say, it’s actually super, smashing, great. After creating a few typical shooting scenarios I found this was an invaluable feature that really does work, rather than making your footage look like it was shot by someone with a nervous twitch.

Super sounds

Audio is similarly well covered. Sony has incorporated 5.1 surround sound – something that proved to be a standout feature when playing back a recording on my HD TV. It seems to magically bring even the dullest of holiday voiceover recordings alive.
Cosmetically speaking, the TG3E sports a pure titanium body that can more than handle the rigours of holiday abuse thanks to what Sony rather pompously calls a ‘Premium Hard Coating’. A Carl Zeiss Vario-Tessar lens offers 10x optical and 120x digital zoom. There’s also 4 megapixel still photo capture.

Things are also much better when you get your footage back home. Transferring it all to view on a HD TV is mercifully straightforward thanks to a supplied docking station. This handy little gizmo has a DVD Burn button too, enabling a swift and permanent archive to be made of any holiday happening.

So now your neighbours will actually look forward to being invited round for a cheese and wine evening while you talk them through that sun-drenched fortnight in Benidorm.

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Rob Clymo is a journalist employed on a freelance basis by Microsoft. The views in this article are those of the author and not of MSN or Microsoft.