Sony Bloggie MHS-TS20 8GB Touch Mobile HD Snap Camera - Black

I've had this camera for about a week now and have been loving it ever since. I've used another "flip" camcorder and the Bloggie Touch puts it to shame.

Pros:
1. Love the quick on and record. Great for spontaneous videos of the little one.
2. The touch screen interface makes it both useful and fun to use the big screen.
3. The still pictures come out brilliant, when the lighting and focus is good.
4. The battery charges up super fast and stays with you for a whole day of shooting.
5. The image stabilization is good. You can take decent video while walking around and panning too. Note that it is not optical, but electronic SteadyShot stabilization.
6. The lens is very good quality and the pictures are crisp.
7. Really like the "snap picture while recording" feature. I find myself using that feature the most. The video doesn't stall while the picture (full 12M resolution) is being taken and since the focus and exposure are usually locked well while you're in the middle of the video, the pictures come out great.

Cons:
1. In low lighting, there is quite a bit of graininess and using the digital zoom makes it much worse.
2. What I really miss with this camera is a flash. Even a tiny one would help with low light pictures.
3. Minor annoyance: to preview a picture right after you take it, you have to go through at least two clicks. Sony could have designed it so that it always goes to the last picture taken by default, instead of the thumbnail list of all pictures/video on the device.

I decided to purchase this camera over a still camera that can do video because:
1. This one is dead simple. One button to turn on, one to take video and one to take stills. This makes it both easy and quick to use.
2. This one can do 1080p video and 720p at 60fps.
3. Its got internal flash and USB connector - no more SD cards or cables. 8GB is enough to get you through the day before you can come back to your laptop to dump the pictures.

All in all happy with my decision

The Bloggie is a still and video camera with the two key features of portability and ease of use. It won't give you outstanding results, but it will give you results that are perfectly good enough for social media sharing, and the advantage of the portability is that you'll probably have this camera with you when you need it.

I have a Kodak Zx1 High Definition Pocket Video Camera which fits into the same sort of niche - a highly portable camera-cum-videorecorder that gives better results than a phone camera but remains small enough to keep with you. The Zx1 is a nice little camera, but it feels plasticky and it has too many buttons for me to be able to remember quickly how to work it. And it offers a lower resolution than the Sony.

The Bloggie is about the same height and width, but is half the thickness. It's screen is twice the size, and it's a touch screen too. It has just three buttons, plus four very short menus on the touchscreen. Rather than being plasicky, it has a brushed steel body with a nice shiny strip where the lens is. It feels lovely to hold. The memory is built in: it doesn't take SD or MMC cards. The batteries are built in too: it charges from the USB.

It is *very* easy to use. There's one button press to turn it on, and then the other two button are used to take still or moving pictures. That's it, really. There's a 4 x digital zoom on the touchscreen, which is a bit jerky, and there are menus on the touchscreen for setup, picture quality, self-timer and playback.

The autofocus on the camera is very good, and can focus down to a few inches (I've uploaded a picture of some matches to show this). Low-light shooting isn't great, but it can take a usable picture even in quite dark conditions. There's no flash. The white balance can't be adjusted, and pictures taken under tungsten bulbs come out quite yellow. The pictures it takes are rather soft (as opposed to sharp), but are a good resolution, ranging from 12M pixel in a 4:3 ratio, through 8M pixel in 16:9 down to 2M pixel in 16:9 (which is HD film resolution). The video is very good, with options of 1080i at 30fps and 720i at 60fps or 30fps. It's not the quality you'd get from a dedicated video recorder, but it's not bad, and it's a whole world better than the Kodak.

There's a USB plug built into the base of the camera, which sounds like a good idea until you realise it will leave the camera sticking awkwardly out of the side of your computer. Fortunately, there's also a (very short) USB extension lead supplied. There's also a mini-HDMI socket so you can watch your movies and pictures on a television, but an HDMI cable is not supplied.

You get a slightly odd lens adapter bundled with the camera, to take 360-degree panoramas. You end up with a doughnut-shaped picture that can be viewed as a scrollable picture inside the Bloggie software. It's a nice enough gimmick.

The software is OK but nothing special. It works fine on my Windows 7 64-bit computer (it updated itself over the internet as soon as it had finished installing). It lets you transfer pictures and movies from the Bloggie to your computer, and then upload them to social networking sites Twitter, Flikr and Facebook (I tried Facebook, which worked fine). There are also predefined "shares" for "My Best Friend", "My Team", "Mom and Dad" and "My Loved Ones". You can mark photos and movies for sharing while they're still on the camera, but of course they don't get uploaded until you next connect to your computer: that's the disadvantage of not using a mobile phone camera.

The software currently works only on Windows, not Mac. Support for Mac is coming soon, apparently.

It's a quality bit of kit for this sort of device. Buy it if you want portability and ease of use; avoid if you want the best quality from your pictures.

From the box this Sony mini HD camcorder is easily charged via the built in (pop-out) usb connector. All the software and user manuals are downloaded from the camera's built in hard drive and set up of both the camera and software is a relatively easy and straight forward.

I was impressed by the speed at which the camera boots up and is ready for use - less than 2 seconds. The face recognition is surprisingly accurate. The touch screen tends to need a firmer press from your finger to respond. All menus for settings and playback are via the touch screen - and as such is prone to become covered in finger prints. The 360 degrees lens adapter is little more than a gimmicky add-on that doesn't add any extra feature to the cameras use, in fact after several attempts of using it I concluded it's something that will probably never be used again.

Criticisms aside - down to the results from the camera. The photos come out a little grainy in low light, but in normal daylight they are surprisingly sharp and crisp and the colors are well balanced which overall provided pleasing results. That said, the results are not in the same league of a decent digital camera in the same price range. Video results are much better and I feel this is the job the unit was made for. From all mini the camcorders I've owned and tested this one undoubtedly provided the sharpest HD results I've seen, although like its predecessors the zoom is jittery when used when shooting, so if you're going to zoom in then do it before you start recording. The video recorder performed well above expectations in normal room lighting conditions. I expected the results to be dark and grainy as they were on the other models I'd tried but in this case they were quite clear and perfectly viewable.

So, to conclude. On price and photo results the MHS20 gets only three stars - if I could rate the video separately then it would get fours stars. It's undoubtedly one of the sleeker, sexier models on the market but it's a shame it doesn't quite deliver the results it should do considering its price.