Sharp VL-SD20 Mini DV | | |  |
Sharp's VL-SD20 looks and feels like a 35mm camera. Holding it by its sides with both hands just felt comfortable. The SD20's most unique feature is its lens section. It swivels 270 degrees from the side of the camera body, making it possible to train the
lens on objects from nearly any angle and still rotate the LCD display to easily see what you're capturing. The fairly large-sized 3-inch LCD is coated with a low-reflectivity resin, letting you adequately view your picture even in outdoor daylight situa
tions. However, we were still disappointed that the camera didn't come with an ocular black and white viewfinder like all of the other cameras in this roundup. A separate ocular viewfinder is important to avid videographers, because they consume less batt
ery power than a color LCD display. But to give credit where credit's due, Sharp's LCD does make it easy to navigate the camera's menu options. The menu options are laid out in a horizontal format similar to a PC, and the navigation buttons for selecting
a particular option are right under each option. This was a comfortable menu system to use. Dividing the menu up into four modes controlled by a button click also helped keep screen clutter to a minimum.
The LV-SD20 uses a lithium-ion battery, and chargi
ng is done inside the camera's housing. The good news is that the battery needn't be fully discharged to recharge properly. The bad news is that when you're using the camera as a charger, you can forget about running outside and filming that spaceship tha
t just landed in your backyard. The camera weighs a scant 1.5 pounds with all accessories attached, and its 660,000-pixel CCD delivered pleasing images. The camera comes with a small assortment of special-effects filters that can be applied to your video
as you shoot, including sepia tone, black and white, stretch, which makes your subjects look wider, and slim, which makes your subjects look thinner. The wide and slim effects are good for a laugh or two, but their novelty wore off quickly.
The fact th
at all the buttons controlling the cam were on the backside rather than spread out along the top, sides, and front, made this unit especially easy to use. However, in the camera's next iteration, we'd like to see the photo-snap button on the top right of
the camera (like you'd find on a 35mm camera) and not so close to the video-record button.
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