The HDR-HC9 is identical in most respects to last year’s Sony HDR-HC7, including the 1/2.9-inch CCD with a gross pixel count of 3,200,000. The performance is, once again, very good. In bright and moderate light, the camcorder shows excellent color balance and sharpness. It’s not hard to see how HDV camcorders perform better than the competing format, AVCHD. All testing to date has shown that HDV camcorders produce cleaner, sharper images.

In low light testing, you’ll start to see differentiations between the HDV models. While the Sony HDR-HC9 was good, it was clearly outperformed by the Canon HV30. Not only did the Canon produce a picture that looked less noisy, it also offers multiple frame rate options (30P and 24P) that improve low light performance and give your video a distinct, almost film-like look.

Sonys are often the camcorder of choice for the beginner. The HDR-HC9 is not a bad place to start for the first timer who wants HD. A large Easy button on the side of the camcorder is the quickest path to carefree shooting. The automatic responses to changes in light and focus are excellent. For those with a little more daring, navigating the HC9’s touch screen menu system is fairly intuitive, if bulky. There are several one-touch features such as Spot Meter and Spot Focus that allow you simply point to the area on the LCD that you want correctly exposed or in focus.

Power users will find the menu system could have been laid out more efficiently. Every other HD camcorder in the Sony lineup was graced with an updated menu. The older menu system on the HC9 is composed of a single, lengthy list that scrolls on for an eternity. If you have the patience, you’ll find a bevy of excellent manual controls. The addition of a “peaking” feature this year helps with manual focus by creating colored noise along the areas that are in focus.

Most serious manual control interface will happen with the Cam Control dial located on the front-left side of the body. The dial is good in theory, offering control over not just focus, but also exposure, AE Shift (a finer exposure adjustment), and White Balance shift (for fine color temperature adjustments). Unfortunately, the actual design, which is very small and finicky, does not live up to its potential.

The HDR-HC9 records video in the HDV format to MiniDV tapes, the same kind used for years on DV camcorders. There are higher quality tapes available for improved HD recording, but they are not necessary. Tape is clearly not the cutting edge recording media. It doesn’t allow random access to scenes like DVD or flash memory cards, and video must be captured to the computer in realtime, but the HDV format is still the best choice for the avid videographer.

The Sony HDR-HC9 has some advantages over the Canon HV30, such as a sturdier build and better ease of use. Canon’s better video quality and options for 24P and 30P recording are hard to pass up, however. Neither is a perfect camcorder, and each has fans in its camp, but we recommend taking a good, hard look at the Canon HV30 before choosing Sony.