Although consumer cameras aren't quite at the full 1080 HD experience yet, the HMX10A shoots at a quite impressive 720p (by 1280 wide) with a frame rate of 60fps. This will allow you to capture exceptionally detailed videos that will not only look great on an HDTV, but any source you may play them back on.

The four gig of built-in memory allows you to record approximately 45 minutes at full quality, and at the lowest resolution and lowest quality you can get up to 360 minutes on the 4gb! Of course there are many other quality options as well; three quality settings at high resolution and two quality settings in low resolution mode. Couple that 4Gb of internal memory with the SDHC/MMC+ support and you can easily triple that space for a little more than a 5-pack of tapes would cost you for your old camera! Video is recorded in MP4 format with the H.264 codec. For low-light situations, the camera has a low light sensitivity of 15 lux and a built-in LED light right above the lense. Although this light won't do much for shooting a dark room, it will light up faces and objects that are in very close proximity to the camera itself.

I was happy to see that the included remote was actually a size that was easy to hold and use. Unlike a lot of other device remotes these days that seem to be getting thinner and smaller every chance they can. A picture of the remote is shown below so you can see all it's functions.

Still image capture is a bit more limited than video recording on the HMX10A. It's limited to the "fine" quality only and can capture at resolutions of 2048 x 1536 (with interpolation), 1440 x 1080 and 640 x 480 (VGA). Being only a 1.6MP CMOS sensor, the still image photos are only around the quality of today's lower end cell phones.

Installation:
To copy files to and from the camera does not even require a driver install. Since the HMX10A is a flash-based camera, it simply shows up like a USB drive would on your system. If you have an SD card in the camera along with the internal memory, two drives will show up.