Sony Bloggie Touch 8GB (MHS-TS20/S)

Video recording, once the province of big, expensive camcorders, is now relatively ubiquitous—if you own a smartphone, an iPod touch, or a digital camera, you've likely got a pretty good camcorder in your pocket. There's a huge quality difference between those devices and the professional-level equipment, but there's an equally huge price difference.

Pocket camcorders like the Sony Bloggie Touch 8GB ($199.99 direct) are an ideal middle ground—they're small, shoot great video, and don't cost a lot of money. It's a constantly expanding category, but the Bloggie stands out with excellent video quality at a variety of resolutions, and offers a still image shooter, a big touch-enabled LCD, and just enough options to satisfy most users. If you need an inexpensive pocket camcorder, the Bloggie Touch is an excellent choice—it's our Editors' Choice for the category.

Design
The only unattractive thing about the Bloggie Touch is its name; otherwise, it's very slick looking. The 2.1-by-4.3-by-0.6-inch (HWD) body is thinner than either the ($299, 3 stars) or the ($229.95, 3.5 stars), and at 4.2 ounces it's about the same weight as most other pocket camcorders. It comes in 4GB and 8GB flavors, which will shoot about one and two hours of 1080p30 video, respectively. At lower resolutions, that number goes up—the 8GB Bloggie Touch will store about 4.5 hours of 720p30 footage.

The unit I tested was black on all four sides (Sony also offers the camera in silver, blue, and pink), except for a silver cap surrounding the lens. The front of the camera has a Sony logo and the lens, and nothing else – it's nicely minimal. On the left side are a Power button and a shutter button for the still camera, and on the right is a door that swings out to show a mini-HDMI port for connecting the Bloggie to an HDTV. The bottom houses a tripod mount, a hook for a carrying cable, and a flip-out USB arm for connecting the camcorder to a computer. The USB arm is oddly difficult to access—you press it down to make it pop out, but it only works if you press in a particular spot. It's also somewhat flimsy. It's convenient, though, meaning you don't need any extra cables with the Bloggie. Since there's no removable battery, the USB arm is also the only way to charge the Bloggie Touch.

Around back is one of the best features of the Bloggie Touch: the sharp, 3-inch touch-screen LCD. The display is where most of the interaction on the camera—from moving through menus to shooting and watching videos and photos—takes place, and it handles it well. The Bloggie works in both landscape and portrait orientations, and all controls and menu options rotate with the screen. When shooting video, the entire screen becomes a viewfinder with controls for zoom, playback and more over top of the corners. The LCD feels enormous compared to the smaller LCDs on the ($149-$199, 3.5 stars) or the Kodak PlayTouch, and is more like shooting video with an ($229.99, 5 stars). The playback features are similarly Apple-like in feel: you slide through the images with your finger, flipping through videos and photos quickly and easily.

The remainder of the Bloggie Touch's interface is similarly user-friendly. On the LCD, you get icons, one each for Settings, Playback, a self-timer (which can be two or ten seconds long) and easy access to the image size options—the Bloggie can shoot video at 1080p30, 720p60 or 720p30, and still images at 12, 8, or 2 megapixels. Shooting a still image is a bit awkward—you press the shutter halfway, wait for the Bloggie to switch modes, then press the shutter the rest of the way—but it's usable once you get used to it.

Performance
The quality of video and quantity of features on the Sony Bloggie Touch are as good as I've seen from a pocket camcorder. Previously, the Flip UltraHD and MinoHD offered the best pure video quality, but the Flip line is missing some of the extra features packed in by the Kodak PlayTouch. The Bloggie Touch has the best of both worlds: Flip-quality video, and plenty of extras.

First, though, video quality: the video from the Bloggie Touch is terrific. It's not as good as what you'll get from a more-expensive full-blown camcorder or D-SLR camera, but footage was clear, bright, and had very accurate colors. Videos, shot in MP4 format, were almost indistinguishable from a Flip device, which is high praise for a pocket camcorder. 720p at 60 frames per second was my favorite mode in which to shoot, as the extra frames make video look even smoother. Audio was fine—it's not great, and a noisy street brought a lot of background noise, but I could always hear the person I wanted to hear. Since the only connectivity options are the flip-out USB port and an HDMI out, there won't be any accessories to improve the audio, like you'd get using the FlipPort.

Shooting video is a two-tap operation: just press the Power button, then the large Record button. The camcorder could turn on and start shooting in about three seconds, so you won't miss many moments waiting for the Bloggie to turn on. Once it's on, it's very responsive to the Record button, and almost instantly starts recording when the button is pressed. With most pocket camcorders, you'll want to be about five feet away from your subject—fixed focus means that anything closer will be blurry. That's not the case on the Bloggie Touch: the camcorder's autofocus will keep subjects in focus that are as little as a few inches away.

There are a couple of quirks to be aware of when you're recording video. First is a critical point: though you can shoot video in any orientation, the Bloggie Touch is very much meant to be used in landscape mode. If you shoot holding the camera vertically, like you would a Flip camcorder, the video will actually record and play back vertically. For widescreen, 1920-by-1080 video, you'll need to shoot in landscape mode, with the screen sideways and the Record button to the left or right. To get the best image quality, it's also best to shoot without using any zoom. Though the Bloggie Touch offers 4x digital zoom, as soon as you begin to zoom in you'll see a significant downgrade in quality. Also, when you zoom in and out while recording, it doesn't move smoothly—you'll see the video jerk in and out as you zoom.

Still photos look as good as they would on a dedicated 12-megapixel compact camera, as long as lighting conditions are right. There's no optical image stabilization on the camera, which means photos taken indoors will likely be noisy—there's no flash, either. Outdoors, though, photos were sharp and accurate, and the Bloggie is definitely a serviceable pocket camera. The Bloggie shoots JPEG images at 12, 8, or 2 megapixels, and all look good.

Connectivity and Conclusions
Getting your videos and photos onto your computer is simple—when you connect the Bloggie Touch to your computer via the flip-out USB arm, it shows up as a drive, and you can drag and drop everything from the camcorder to your computer. Inside the Bloggie Touch is Sony's Bloggie Software, which allows you to upload photos to the Web, share them with friends, or just organize them on your computer. For now, that software is Windows-only (Sony says it's coming to Macs right before Christmas), but the drag-and-drop operation works just fine on a Mac. On the camcorder itself, you can mark certain photos or videos for sharing to YouTube, Facebook or other sites; when you connect the Bloggie to your computer, they're automatically uploaded.

The Sony Bloggie Touch is the best pocket camcorder you can buy right now, both in terms of video quality and extra features. It's fast, small, light, and shoots great video and still shots. For the budget-minded, the Flip UltraHD is still an excellent choice, and can be had for $30 less than the Bloggie. For sheer simplicity, it's also still hard to beat the Flip camcorders, but the Bloggie does everything, and does it all quite well.

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