Any Sony HDR-SR7/8 owners?

[ChimpanzeeUK]

Hi All,

I'm considering buying the above camcorder but I'm now a bit worried after reading some of the reviews and posts on these and other forums. Many of them talk about problems with editing but they are about 6 months old and i was wandering if anything has changed? The main things I'm worried about are:

Low-light performance - I want to use the camera for recording gigs among other things. Will this be a problem?
Wind-reduction (or lack of) - Is this as bad as i've read?
Editing - Has software been updated yet to allow editing of the camera's native video format without noticeable loss of quality. My package of choice is Premier Pro. Is this capable of editing the video?
Battery life - In real, every-day use, how good is the battery life?

Are there any alternative cameras to recommend. The hard drive recording is a must for me as I have been using miniDV up to now and the process of rewinding tapes and capturing them through firewire is a real pain. I like the "drag-n-drop" idea of HDD recording.

Thanks in advance!!

[zoobie]

You need to ask these in cam forums like www.camcorderinfo.com
Most here advocate tape drive for obvious reasons.

[ChimpanzeeUK]

I'll give that a try. Thanks for the tip.

[zoobie]

and
http://www.sonyhdvinfo.com/

[Ollie6431]

...
Are there any alternative cameras to recommend. The hard drive recording is a must for me as I have been using miniDV up to now and the process of rewinding tapes and capturing them through firewire is a real pain. I like the "drag-n-drop" idea of HDD recording.

...

Selection of the recording format really depends on your need/usage.
1. MiniDV is recommended if you put high priority on editing. Support for HDV (MPG-2 on MiniDV) is widespread with most editing softwares. MiniDV is also preferred by professionals who typically put all the video footage on a tape in one go and transfer the video to PC for editing in one go. For the average Joe who just uses the cam off-and-on, it is a pain to cue the tape to pick scenes for playing/instantly deleting scenes/start recording, etc.

2. HDD or SDHC would be convenient for "drag and drop" and instant selection of clips for playing/deletion (very much like a digital camera) for people who do not have priority on editing. The video files are in AVCHD (h.264) format which is highly compressed (one hour of high-def video fits on 4 GB, very much like MPG-2 in SD!). One needs top-of-the-line PC (Alienware Area 51 or Dell XPS with top-notch graphics card, around $5,000?) with selected editing softwares to do the job.