The best test of the HDR-PJ760V came out of the blue. A real-life drama proved this camcorder's chops as a fully automatic point-and-shoot model. On the afternoon of Monday, August 8, I was in my home office in the El Cerrito hills. It overlooks the Chevron refinery site three miles northwest of me. I was getting this camcorder ready for a test when the Number 4 Crude Unit blew up, shooting flames into the sky and a plume of black smoke towering up to 3,000 feet. I dashed to my office window and let the camcorder rip. I shot in full-auto mode--no time to fool around with settings. You can see the results here:

This turned out to be a terrific test of the camcorder's ability to intelligently compensate for exposure and minimize artifacts in one of the most challenging shooting situations you can face: shooting directly into the sun. I had no time to attach the supplied lens hood--Sony needs to make that easier to snap on. Even so, the video shows almost no flare, you see almost no banding in the sky (a common artifact on non-pro, and even some pro cams), and the video has decent contrast. The unit's SteadyShot optical image stabilization also worked phenomenally well. I got very little motion jitter even though I was hanging out my bedroom window, constantly shifting to keep my bureau edge from gouging my hip.

Finally, the surround-sound stereo mics did a great job picking up the radio announcer across the room. I could easily make out the breaking news even though my radio was a dozen feet away and its volume was room level. Which brings me to one of my main beefs: It was too easy to cover up the top-mounted mics with my fingers, especially with both hands wrapped around the camcorder body. If you plan to do lots of shooting, consider an external mic, such as Sony's (ECM-CG50, $240), which mounts onto the hot shoe.