April 3 - 8:15am EDT   Sony this morning turned around its focus on traditional camcorders to competing against very small cameras such as Sanyo's Xacti line. The AVCHD-based Handycam TG1 is less than five inches tall, 2.5 inches deep, and weighs 10 ounces but is still capable of capturing a 1920x1080 picture. This makes it the smallest HD-capable camera yet, Sony says. While much of this size reduction comes from recording to Memory Stick Pro Duo cards, a 2.7-inch touchscreen offloads many of the controls that would otherwise occupy space on the main body. [full story]

January 8 - 11:40am EST   As part of its efforts at CES, Sony has revamped nearly all of its Handycam models for the new year. The HD models now all receive face detection that auto-focuses on as many as eight human faces in a given scene and adjusts color balance to properly capture the subjects. For these HD cameras, more time is spent on encoding video for these pixels than the rest of the scene, Sony says. Topping the range, the SR12 (pictured) and SR11 are also the first Sony home cameras to use a new 5.7-megapixel sensor that nearly doubles to 10.2 megapixels for still photos alone or 7.6 megapixels while also recording video; this dual-record method can also be sustained on these models ... [full story]

January 7 - 12:25pm EST   Canon's time at CES has been spent introducing a completely new line of HD video cameras and upgrading its standard-definition models. Called VIXIA, the premium range is entirely HD-capable and relies largely on tapeless storage. The HF10 serves as the flagship by using 16GB of internal flash memory and offering an SDHC slot that can accept as much or more storage in removable form. This allows it to capture as much as six hours of HD video in AVCHD format just on built-in memory while offering the instant response and skip protection of the flash format. A second model, the HF100, shares the same features but uses only removable SDHC cards for video. [full story]