Sony MHS-PM1

The basics

Sony comes a little late to the pocket-sized camcorder party. It’s following in the tracks of the Flip family, Kodak’s Zi8 and Creative’s Vado. The PM1 has a distinctive orange livery and a rotating lens that’ll ensure it gets noticed. HD movies are captured at 1440x1080 resolution and stills are 5MP – both are recorded to Sony’s Memory Stick PRO Duo cards. There’s also built-in PC software to help you edit and share your images.

The good

The rotating lens means its great for shooting at dramatic angles, and perfect for video bloggers looking to record direct to camera. Rotating the lens makes it possible to protect that precious lens from scratches – as it can be swivelled so that it disappears from view. It’s very tactile, so you’ll love holding and shooting with it, and you won’t need a degree in geek tech to use it. Uploading clips is a cinch too.

The bad

Recording to Sony’s Memory Stick PRO Duo cards means you can’t use any SD cards you may have in other devices – and you’ll have to factor in the extra cost of buying more storage media. There’s no HDMI output so, unfortunately, you can’t connect it to a high-def telly that way. Movie clip quality isn’t exceptional, with some colours being a bit off.

The bottom line

The PM1 is a great looking gadget with plenty of fun features, plus a well-designed interface, which makes it easy to use. The video performance would benefit from tweaking though, and it’d be nice to see a few more connections/terminals added to its spec sheet.