Product Reviews

I've used Sony movie and DV cameras for over 40 years from Super 8 onwards, many in very demanding environments such as underwater housings and up ships and yacht masts dangling round my neck, none have ever failed. Never used eyepiece as spectacles get in the way. I many shooting situations there is no time to get into manual settings, never a problem that cant be sorted in post production especially with resolve 18 editing and Topaz. Gor me on the wrong side if 70 I need to to consider weight of equipment, and size, I use and carry action camera, small Gimbal cameras. and drones. With this Sony I can now also use the excellent optical zoom to get the movie shots along with stills. I can also use my filters. And one point, if you do Pan do it slowly and keep the horizon steady. This camera will look after you at this great price. But its one third of the price of the nearest Pro Sony. The one real benefit is I don't have to put myself at risk clambering over hazards and making an idiot of myself by falling over. A good ploy when explaining to my wife why I need this new essential bit of safety gear.

The performance of the camera is very good, with excellent battery life. The overall package is let down by the lack of a viewfinder. This could be compensated for to some extent by having a brightness control of the viewing screen. Filming in cloudy-bright conditions makes it almost impossible to see what you are shooting.

I bought this a month ago and was very pleased with its ease of use, picture quality and stabilisation features. Its only on a bright sunny day that I realosed the monitor was absolutely useless, and maybe I should have bought a camcorder with an optical viewfinder as well. I was also disssapinted that the Sony Centre sold me "old stock" in that the FDR-AX43A has now been introduced with a better display.

The quality of this camcorder in regard to image quality, stabalisation, battery length is great. But the real downside is the associated software. I would like to use this camera for youtube content creation. It would be so useful to have the option to use the item also as a webcam, yet sony doesn't support software for this as it does for other cameras. I purchased a capture card to help, but it was still glitchy, continually switching off midstream despite having changes settings.

This is a small device but with great quality. Easy to carry and use

I purchased this recently as I am a golfer and a musician (not both at the same time obviously) and I wanted to record some music and my golf swing. I've only tried the music up to now and whilst the instructions do say that the reproductive quality when recoding in 4K may not be brilliant that I found to be an understatement. When trying to replay my music on my laptop the 4K version is unwatchable as there is juddering and drop out on the tape to make it useless. It does replay very well through my 4K television but it was the laptop that I needed it to play properly through. Overall not a good purchase for why I bought it.

I bought this and now I am returning it because they took out the Night Shot feature. I didn’t mind it not having the external viewfinder, but the Night Shot IR System is what was needed for ghost hunting. The Balanced Optical Stabilization System would have been great to provide a less shaky video than with the FDR-ax33 when walking around and filming. When I purchase a product I want the same features or more that I saw in older models and not fewer. Another weakness is that even though it is a newer model it is still recommended to use only a 64GB SD Card when larger capacity SD cards are out in the market for years. If it had the Night Shot it would have been the perfect Camcorder for my needs.