What it boiled down to is having to move up to a CCD format that would utilize the DV recording system to its capacity. This led me to try out several cameras. I ended up looking at Sony VX2000 and TRV900. I could not distinguish any important differences between the pictures these two DV cams produced, and being size was important (I travel back and forth between Asia a lot), as was being able to discreetly use the camera in candid situations. The TRV900 excels in this area, providing the professional quality picture, while still being small enough to carry in places you would never take a full size camcorder.

I think most users will be pleased with the manual override features of the TRV900. I found the manual focus ring on the lens barrel to be a familiar and comforting design feature. You can manually control shutter speeds, aperture and gain, white balance, audio levels, to name the important ones.

Low light performance is awsome. I was able to even get a distinguishable picture in moonlight, albeit using the max gain and slowing the shutter speed way down, but the camera could see as well as I could. Under a street lamp, the TRV900 delivers a picture like that of a news camera live shot. It looks rich, detailed and noise-free.

I find where the TRV900 excels is when shooting colored lights, such as Christmas trees ablaze with lights. The TRV900 keeps the chroma and lumanence aligned for a rich, crisp reproduction of the colors. Point source lights are the "Kryptonite" of super cameras, and generally look terrible, especially on NTSC composite cameras. Not so with the TRV900. Sony made some good decisions with the way the camera handles too much point source light, too, creating a slight 6-point star flare effect when really bright point sources are viewed. I photographed some crystal figurines in a local mall and was marveling at how nicely the camera augmented the specular highlites. It looks like a QVC commercial.

In general, I find the picture to be nicely balanced, have the right amount of contrast, saturation and hue tones. Under the various lighting found in a mall, the camera doesn't try to overcompensate for changing light--it maintains the mood of the lighting of each store we shot footage of. It truely captures the warmth vs. the coldness of different stores' lighting.