Bought an SR11 from VSC Technology for Teachers. Company from Detroit that supplies schools, etc. Will sell to individuals. Sony dealer. Ad says available mid-March, but they already have them. Ordered by phone - they shipped me one Monday, I gotit today. $966 and $20 shipping, no tax outside Michigan. No sales pitch at all - just ask for info relative to th transaction.

Cant post url, but here's enough info:
shopvsc.com/Sony-HDR-SR11-Hi-Definition-Hard-Drive-Camcorder-p/son-hdrsr11.htm

Never had a camcorder before. After reading all the horror stories about AVCHD and the handling pros/cons of camcorders, all I can say is - it's all bull.
I checked the batt - camera had 27min of charge when unpacked So I started shooting. Don't even hear or feel a whisper of the HDD. The vid and stills are great. I had the software loaded in my computer in minutes and files downloded. Viewed vids on a Gateway TFT LCD HD monitor. Beautiful - color looked great, contrast was great, focus seemed to need horizontals, but this only came into play with extreme zoom on a small area.
Stills are great too, but flash yielded a tiny bit too much red - easily fixed in any photo edit software. Cam prefers flash - turned it off and got great exposure with excellent color rendition.
Camera is a gem to handle - all ports/doors are attached, sliding and self storing. Touch screen is fine - I think it's really convenient. BTW, I didn't read the manual - all menus are logical and self-prompting. A LOT easier than any still digicam I have. I'll definitely carry a microfiber cloth to keep the LCD screen clear. It doesn't show fingerprints in use, but prefer to keep it clean.
This is all totally newbie feedback, but this thing is the best. I'll try to post my first raw file, but need to shorten it a bit from 138meg.
Also had it on a Sharp Aquos HDTV in minutes - REALLy great pic. Non-digital cable now looks really bad in comparison.
I have Vegas - this weekend I'll load that. Haven't played with the Sony software yet, but for basic plug-n-play it couldn't be easier. (Computer is a Toshiba laptop, 2.2GH Centrino Duo, 2.2GB RAM.)
More later - suggest things I might check out. For $966, this CC blows me away.

How do you upload a file for sharing here? Tried to zip, but no compression - already compressed I guess?
Where can I upload a 26 meg raw file for you to download?
File has SR11 indoor clip with dog hair detail far/close, high sunlight-in-window backlight contrast, etc.
Cam does really well....

Hey Dan i just purchased that as well waiting for Dell to ship the thing to me. www.vimeo.com is a great place to upload clips for HD. I really want to know how this camera handles. I hope the quality of the picture is impressive. I did so much research into getting this camera and I hope i made the right choice. I mainly got it for my Wife and I who are expecting our first child. But I also would like to get into a little cinematography. Just register and sign up for vimeo and they will give you a 500mb upload limit a week. So that should be good for you.

Ahhh, I see some complexity now. Converted a file to wmv using the software included. All vertical elements get the bad zig-zags with any motion at all. Guess I'll have to break out the Vegas 8.
Still blown away with the handling, ease of direct play/download to computer and HDTV and with the great vid quality.

Tried to make a short cut less tha 500k in size but at literally less than a second the file was still 800k+.

Vimeo doesn't upload raw AVCHD files (at least I didn't see how). Do you call them "raw" or "native" as they come from the camera?

Hellow Danlew .... I'm also a relative NOOB when it comes to video cameras. My specialty is home theater PCs. I picked up the SR11 yesterday at Best Buy and my initial experiences match yours. I was extremely impressed with the quality of movies on my 40" Bravia and 50" SXRD. The camcorder is DEAD silent when recording and it's very easy to use. My last camera was a Canon 8mm from 1999. My goodness, these devices have come a LONG way since then.

I'm just getting started with this thing. Can anyone recommend a good video editor for the PC? I assume Adobe Premier will handle the m2ts files but I'm not thrilled about having to pay almost eight hundred dollars for the software. I'm thinking more along the lines of Ulead Video Studio Plus for $99.

Sony Vegas 8 has been recommended to me as the best for this camera. I bought it from EBay Express/thenerds.com pretty cheap. It came in 3 days - brand new, sealed box.

Hey Dan here are a few other sites that will let you upload a file and then you can download it.

http://www.megaupload.com/

http://www.rapidshare.com/

http://www.sendspace.com/

I like megaupload and raipshare a lot.

Hope you get something up.. I really want to see the footage from this CC.

This is the first clip shot with the SR11. Out of the box - I just powered up and shot. Hope it helps and hope the link works.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=YJ4MWA8F

Wow Dan I am extremely impressed with that video. For it being just out of the box shoooting that was nice. If you have time and a chance please post some more footage if you can.

Your dogs are very nice! Not camera shy at all :P

From the file posted, can you tell anything about the technical quality of the camera vs previous AVCHD cams?

From the file posted, can you tell anything about the technical quality of the camera vs previous AVCHD cams?


I wish I could, but just like you. This is my first HD Camcorder. But im sure someone else with more experience will be able to answer that.

Just thought I would update the thread with some baseline information regarding the SR-11. At some point someone should start a new "Official SR-11" thread for this type of information.

I've only had a couple of hours over the past day to play with it. Here's what I can tell you so far.

1 hour highest quality (1920x1080) AVCHD video = 7.25GB
Time to transfer to PC via USB = 10 minutes

Once Picture Motion Browser loaded up the video I could view it by double clicking on it. I was surprised to see roughly 60 percent cpu usage (both cores!!) just by playing the file! My machine is a home built dual core E8400 ever so slightly overclocked to 3.3GHz with 4gig of RAM. Video card is a new nvidia 9600GT. The nvidia card should assist with the decode of the file which is why I was surprised to see my cpu so high. Obviously Picture Motion Browser doesn't do hardware acceleration. Make sure you bring lots of cpu to this party.

After viewing I right-clicked the file and saw are couple of conversion options, one of which was WMV! That made my heart flutter for just a second. HD home videos straight to WMV means instant compatibility with all windows computers which would be nice for family members. Imagine my disappointment to see I could only output to WMV at 640x480!! Darn!! Why can't I go straight to WMV-HD!! Bummer.

I also had the option to export to MPEG2. I wasn't given any type of quality options before the conversion. The resulting MPEG was 4.05 gigs and had a resolution of 1440x1080. Quality was pretty good but not quite as good as the original AVCHD. The conversion took only 40 minutes which was less than I expected. The good news is that Picture Motion Browser is multi-core aware as both my cores were pretty much pegged during the conversion. Still, the conversion is faster than real time and I'm happy about that. The more cpu the better here too.

More to come.

After viewing I right-clicked the file and saw are couple of conversion options, one of which was WMV! That made my heart flutter for just a second. HD home videos straight to WMV means instant compatibility with all windows computers which would be nice for family members. Imagine my disappointment to see I could only output to WMV at 640x480!! Darn!! Why can't I go straight to WMV-HD!! Bummer.

I also had the option to export to MPEG2. I wasn't given any type of quality options before the conversion. The resulting MPEG was 4.05 gigs and had a resolution of 1440x1080. Quality was pretty good but not quite as good as the original AVCHD. The conversion took only 40 minutes which was less than I expected. The good news is that Picture Motion Browser is multi-core aware as both my cores were pretty much pegged during the conversion. Still, the conversion is faster than real time and I'm happy about that. The more cpu the better here too.

More to come.

Thanks for the update!

This program will do a fantastic job of converting raw AVCHD:

http://www.elecard.com/products/products-pc/consumer/converter-studio-avchd/

Anymore footage from the SR11? :P

1 hour highest quality (1920x1080) AVCHD video = 7.25GB
Time to transfer to PC via USB = 10 minutes

I'm surprised it isn't faster than that. This amounts to 12MB/sec and I was expecting about double that. Maybe the HDD is very slow or PMB transfer is inefficient.

Agreed. I was expecting better times as well. I'll try a drag and drop transfer next and let you know whether it's any faster.

Drag and drop took 6 minutes and I averaged 21 megabytes per second. Definitely faster than the import but with drag and drop you don't get a single video in m2ts form. Videos are stored on the camera in MTS streams. Looks to me like they're about 2 gigs in size each (probably a limitation of the file system ... fat32 maybe?). The import process combines them into a single file.

Edit -- yes, the file system is fat32 which is why the streams are no larger than 2gigabytes.