Best Pocket Camcorder – Sony Bloggie Touch Review & Unboxing

If you are a Blogger who loves taking product reviews and unboxing videos then for sure you would be trying out different camcorders but most of them would fail in the quality aspect because either some of the Camera’s are bulky while some of them are good enough but costly which can go above your budget. Here is one very creative and useful camera from Sony which is called as the ‘Bloggie’ and is available in different models based on the consumer requirements and budgets. In this article we are going to review the Sony Bloggie Touch MHS-TS20/S 8GB Model which is currently the best in the series.

Camcorder Design

If you are interesting in taking a video of some small meetup, get together or a funny act going around your blog, would you opt for using a Costly Professional Camera with a Large Lens and a Tripod or would you opt for a Budget Camcorder with awesome recording facility and the size of a mobile Phone? The Sony Bloggie Touch is one of the best in this series because its small, compact, costs $199 and can shoot amazingly great videos.

The overall size of this camera is 2.1-by-4.3-by-0.6-inch (HWD) which is almost around the size of the Apple iPhone 4. The front has a large 3″ Touch Screen using which you can perform different actions with a large RED Button which is useful for capturing videos. One the back you have the camera and the SONY logo.

On the sides of the Camera you the ON / OFF button, one button for taking still photos and on the other side there is a mini-HDMI port for connecting the Bloggie to a HDTV. There is a push-to-pop out USB port in it, that can be used to connect the camcorder directly to the computer to transfer the captured videos or images. Just adjacent to the USB port, there is the socket to fix the camera on a tripod stand for still capturing.

There are no more such buttons, and most of the things can be done using the display screen, where flipping through photos, videos, setting the options for camcorder and capturing pictures etc. can be done. One of the good features of the Bloggie is that it works both in Portrait and Landscape mode, and rotates by itself. Not just the display but the options in it too rotate and arrange themselves when the Bloggie is rotated to switch the viewing mode.
The viewing of the photos and videos is similar to what we see in the Apple gadgets, slide through them with your finger. There are different levels of recording videos and capturing pictures, i.e. the video recording can be done at 1080p, 720p, 640p quality and the still images can be captured at 12MP, 8MP or 2MP quality.

Camcorder Performance

One of the best camcorders that we always have seen was the Flip Mino HD, and Flip UltraHD but they were limited to just a few options, and seemed to have been made to record videos. Nothing extra. But the Sony Bloggie Touch is power packed with features and extras that the pocket-sized camcorders never had. Of course the DSLR cameras can beat it, but we are not comparing the video quality with the professional ones. For a camcorder for this small size and purpose, the video quality is excellent. The videos recorded at both 1080p quality and 720p quality were clear, bright and the colors were beautifully displayed.

One small problem with the audio here is that the recording is too clear and that’s the reason why all the background sounds are noted too. It makes the audio quality a little low, though it is good enough to hear what we actually want to hear.

Autofocus – One of the best features with the Bloggie Touch. With some other camcorders you need to do that yourself by maintaining a distance from the object while recording the videos but the Bloggie adjusts the focus by itself depending on the video quality you preferred, and so you don’t need to keep adjusting the distance for clarity.

Starting up and recording – I liked the speed of starting up of the Bloggie camcorder. Just a few seconds and the Bloggie starts, ready to record the video. When we press the record button, it instantly starts the video recording. This is a lot faster than the other similar-sized camcorders and the professional cameras too, all of which take some time to start up and record the videos.

Orientation – Here we need to remember that for a full screen video quality, the camcorder needs to be used in a landscape mode. Because, when you would hold it vertically the video recording and playback too is done vertically, reducing the quality when we rotate the video purposefully.

Picture quality – Similar to any other cameras, the image quality reduces with zooming in, but I loved the quality of the images produced when capturing in 12MP quality. The pictures are in JPEG quality. I would suggest not to consider this as a digital camera quality provider, as there is no proper image stabilization and no flash too.

Connectivity – The Bloggie camcorder provides an easy connectivity options to the HDTV and to computers, where the flip-out USB arm can help easily connect the device to the computers and a simple software for Windows computer helps in exploring the videos and image files organized in folders. For Mac, the things are far easier although there is no software, the camcorder acts as an external storage. While the connection with the computer is on, the Camcorder has the options to upload the videos to Facebook and YouTube directly.

Final Words

The Bloggie Touch camcorder is one of the perfect pocket-sized camcorders for recording HD videos, and occasionally captures pictures too. The large touchscreen LCD is well responsive, and the design is very sleek with a small size. Though there is no more option to extra accessories and connectivity, the given features can be pretty enough to get things done. The video is captured at various frame rates, and I would limit the capturing to videos due to the lack of flash, and indoor photography is not markedly well.