Sony Has a Good Product

I just purchased this cam and I find it great. I was a bit concerned about it not having an Image Stabilization System. While that is true in terms of recording - it has a function called a Time Based Correction (TBC). From what I gather and I am not a real techie - on playback it sends the two fields present in analog recording into circuitry so it can be processed Digitally and then sent out to the TV/VCR or whatever. This helps compensate for jitter after the fact. I ran an old 8mm tape through the system that was recorded many moons ago and the result was a very smooth picture, and even in cases where the shake/jitter was large - it made the picture viewable. Also by having this feature - still frames are sharp without any noise. From what I gather it takes the frames - throws out extra pixels that are choppy and re-assembles them into a single frame. A rather neat feature I believe. Bad side though is that it makes the resultant video resemble 8mm instead of Hi8 and on older 8mm tapes makes them resemble VHS - still, if you ever use a cam in a situation where a tripod is not feasible - a great feature.