Sony Bloggie MHS-TS20K review

Cisco’s decision to cease the manufacture of Flip pocket video cameras came as a big disappointment; the products have been firm favourites in the PC Pro offices for a few years now, due to class-leading image quality and ease of use. But one man’s loss is another’s gain, so the saying goes, and other manufacturers are stepping in with their own products in the hope of grabbing some market share.

The Sony Bloggie MHS-TS20K is the first model we’ve reviewed in the post-Flip era, and it bears all the classic hallmarks of the pocket video camera genre. It has a pop out USB arm and a good dollop of built-in memory (8GB). Sony’s video and picture management software is stored onboard ready for direct installation, and there’s a big red button on the rear panel for starting and stopping video recording. This camera does move things on a bit, however, and there are a number of areas where it pulls ahead of the last generation Flip UltraHD.

Where that camera could only muster 720p HD footage, for example, the Sony is able to record 1080p; where the Flip has 2in screen, the Sony sports a 3in display; and where the Flip was built all of plastic, the Bloggie is encased in luxurious aluminium. It’s a beautifully made thing and tops off the luxury feel with a couple of real crowd-pleasers: the display is also touch-sensitive (using capacitive technology); and included in the box is a rather ingenious 360 degree converter lens. You can see some sample footage below.

The latter is a real masterstroke: it latches on to the top of the camera, snapping snugly into position with the help of a magnet or two, and allows you to shoot true 360 degree video. It doesn’t look very impressive on screen as you shoot – footage appears in a small circle in the middle of the frame. Anyone familiar with cheap Lomography fisheye cameras will be familiar with this sort of output.

Import it into Sony’s Bloggie software, however, and when you double-click the footage, a special 360 degree viewer pops up. This shows a live panoramic thumbnail view at the bottom of the window and a bigger box at the top, displaying a section of the 360 degree view at full resolution. Drag a navigation box left and right on the panoramic thumbnail and the box at the top pans left and right through the view (the screenshot below should make things clearer).

The resulting panorama can also be exported, extreme-letterbox style, as a 1,280 x 720 WMV file. Do note, though, the final resolution of the video is lower than this as a result of all the stretching and interpolation that needs to be done to the initial, disc-shaped footage. The video below shows three such panoramas we shot during testing.

All sorts of fun can be had with the 360˚ attachment, but it isn’t the camera’s only strength. We particularly like the ‘share it later’ feature. This allows you to mark clips and stills for upload to Flickr, Facebook, Picasa Web Albums, YouTube or Sony’s own Personal Space video sharing service. These marked items are then uploaded the next time you plug the Bloggie into your PC.

Image quality is very good too. The camera boasts digital image stabilisation, which works well to smooth out bumps and shakes, and features both autofocus and face detection. It has a larger sensor (at 1/2.5in vs 1/4.5in) than the Flip UltraHD as well. In our indoor and outdoor tests, all this contributed to superior performance in most respects.

It was more than a match for the Flip in terms of detail and colour fidelity. Noise in low light was obvious, but again controlled with little colour contamination. The Flip would appear to hold the advantage of a higher frame rate over the Sony, with a buttery smooth 50fps making it better for action and panning shots than the 30fps of the Sony. But even here, the Bloggie has it covered: drop the resolution down to 720p, and a 60fps option becomes available.

We do have some gripes, and the biggest is that the Bloggie isn’t a very comfortable camera to shoot with. Although 360 footage is shot as you’d expect, by holding the camera upright, portrait style, recording standard shots requires you to tilt the camera over and shoot with the camera on its side.

This makes it tricky to shoot one-handed, and the positioning of the record button right at the edge of the device doesn’t help. Neither are we particularly enamoured of the software’s inability to upload footage to sharing sites in the background. Once you hit the Share button, the whole application is locked until the job is finished.
But these complaints aren’t quite enough to put us off. The latest Sony Bloggie is a lovely piece of kit. It’s fun and generally easy to use; it’s extremely well-made; and it shoots great quality 1080p video. And with a price that’s not too expensive, we reckon it’s a pretty darned good buy.

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