Hard drive based cameras are relatively new, and generally aren’t as mature as their MiniDV counterparts. Low battery life, poor image quality or frustrating ergonomics typically hold them back.

The Sony SR1 comes so close to getting everything right. Image quality is great, it feels comfortable and is well weighted. The manual controls are expansive; going so far as to let you use and set zebra levels (visible stripes that appear across overexposed areas of the image). Considering the size of the unit, the image quality is beautiful, albeit a little grainy, but you need to be a little pedantic to notice or complain.

But all this comes with a painful tradeoff.

The SR1 compresses footage into H.264, the new wonder-codec that powers the HD-DVD and Blu-ray world. This means that you’ll get High Definition 1080i footage at lower bitrates than MiniDV footage (in quality steps of 5, 7, 9 and 15Mb/s, compared to MiniDV’s 25Mb/s), and the results are stunning. The problem is that this particular flavour of H.264 compression is wrapped in Sony/Panasonic’s consumer H.264 wrapper, known as AVCHD.

Currently, only Sony’s flawed bundled software can read AVCHD, so you can’t edit the footage you shoot, and you can only play it back with a computer. This may change if Sony release its own consumer editing software or plug-ins for editing programs. For now, not even Vegas, Sony’s own professional video editing program, can open the files the SR1 creates.

We can’t understand why. H.264 takes a bit of muscle to decode, making editing a little trickier, but processors scaled far beyond the minimum requirements for basic editing somewhere between one and two years ago. AVCHD does make the image rich and small, but it’s evidently not ready yet.

You’ll get about one and a half hours of recording time from the standard battery, although Sony claims the battery life can reach six hours with a bigger battery and the LCD closed. Depending on the bit rate you record to you’ll get from seven to eleven hours of recording time in HD mode from an empty hard drive -- which is an average recording time for a 30GB HDD camera.

The automatic focus is snappy, and you can assign it to a ring at the front of the camera if you’d prefer to drive. When you do it expands the image on the viewfinder and touch-sensitive LCD from a scaled down frame to a zoomed view where every pixel on the viewfinder represents one pixel in the HD image. This helps you find and specify the camera’s focal point, something that’s notoriously hard to do without an external monitor or a similar setting.

You can also assign the exposure setting, AE shift or white balance shift to the front ring, but for straight automatic shooting the camera deals with changes in light very well. The CMOS sensor is a little noisy, but in the face of the great colour and HD resolution, you have to be a little pedantic to notice it.

AVCHD will doubtless mature, and the beautiful images it takes should be editable when Sony gets around to releasing plug-ins for the popular editing suites or releasing its own conversion tool to make the SR1’s HD footage editable. Until then, you’ll need to archive all the footage somewhere (the SR1’s 30GB HDD is good for 11 hours of HD at the highest bitrate) using the lacklustre included software or use the same software to convert it to editable standard definition MPEG2 files.

In keeping with characteristic Sony style, the SR1 represents excellent hardware marred by incomplete, proprietary software. If you are confident that Sony will provide an editing solution for the SR1, then it’s full of plus points. However we think it’s incomplete, premature and that you should hold off until AVCHD support grows.