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I sometimes shoot high-end videos for my company with dSLRs to get beautiful, shallow depth of field, but I bought this mostly for my family. I have 10 grandkids under the age of 7 and you can't follow them around with a dSLR and catch all the action without being out of focus and shaky. To my surprise, the footage looks so good from this camcorder I can use it for certain commercial footage too.
Its #1 feature is the floating lens. It's so freaky to look at the lens while moving the camera back and forth and see how it absorbs the shake more than any camcorder ever has that I know of, by far. Where the floating lens is most amazing is when you zoom long and you're trying to hold steady but your shaky hands can't quite get it still enough. They can now. It has a 17x zoom, so long is really long.
What I expected is it would provide a look like a Steadicam does. Unfortunately, it's not really that and it took me awhile to understand why. For one thing, it's so light that it's easy to rotate it right or left as you're walking or running with it and it's hanging down by the handle. A steadicam doesn't roll right or left easily because it has a long vertical axis. The floating lens doesn't prevent that. Also, since it's so light, it's easy to move it up and down, side to side, and the floating lens only partially helps that. It's the shake when zoomed in and you're holding it fairly still but the lens is so long that it normally would make it all shaky where it seriously smooths out the shake. In other words, actually moving it sideways is not where the floating lens helps so much; it's when you rotate it left and right quickly that it does.
Since the sensor is small, you don't get shallow depth of field like you do in a dSLR, but for run 'n gun chasing children, doing documentaries, shooting action, etc., when you want things in focus and sharp, it's seriously good at that. It's surprisingly good at low light but not like a Canon 5d MKII or MKIII. The sound is awesome. It's really simple to use and the white balance, auto exposure and auto focus are amazing. I can't understand how they made it so great with so small a unit.
The only annoyance for me is getting the video off the internal memory is a pain. I had to use that funky Sony cable that it comes with that I lost, and hook it to an external drive formated with a FAT file system. I finally figured it out, but I use a Mac and it was such a pain I ended up just using memory cards. I'm told you can import into Final Cut X, but I couldn't even get it to recognize my MacBook Pro Retina.
A feature that seemed like pure gimmick to me is the projector. You can project onto a wall or car or something what you just shot. Oh my gosh. My kids and friends are addicted to that. I would sometimes shoot amazing footage on a Disneyland ride because it smooths out the shakes so well, then entertain everyone in the line by projecting the footage.
A month after buying it and shooting nonstop for two straight weeks with it, I'm still in awe of how good it is. I'm usually a very tough critic of camcorders because this is the first one I've really loved after having owned and sold 8 of them.
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