Review on Sony MHSFS1 B Bloggie Camera by Mike Ogunlana

This little camera takes great video. We are so happy with it. Our daughter is very active in the theater and this little gem does a great job in low light as well as filming sleigh rides in the brightest sun and snow. HD video is great and the ability to connect the camera directly to a plasma TV is great, especially for my wife who has technical issues. Now for the bad. The video management software on the camera leaves a lot to be desired at best. I wasn't able to successfully upload the video to any of the "pre-linked" sites (YouTube, Facebook, etc.) let alone Sony's private page where we could share the video with grandparents without browsing YouTube or Facebook too have to. Moving videos from camera to computer is also more painful than it seems reasonable. The software is probably fine if you store all your digital media on the C: drive in your Windows user folders. Unfortunately, I have enough digital media and software that the C: drive is only used by the operating system and software. I store all my digital media files on a separate hard drive. Well, the Bloggie software cannot be configured to import directly to any file drive or folder other than the User Videos folder on the C: drive. Also, there is no way to control the importing of videos based on the names of the program-created folder where the video will be imported, or the video file itself. As a software developer, I am stunned that these basic functional requirements have not been met when almost every other camera and recording device offers them, even directly from the device itself, let alone supporting software. So to deal with this, I access the camera's storage directly from Windows Explorer, navigate through the Bloggie file structure, and manually copy the videos to the desired location, giving them meaningful names as I go. The biggest sins in software development are: insufficiently defining the functional requirements for the software and then not testing the software sufficiently to ensure that the functional requirements actually work. It's a shame and I expected a lot more. Despite all that, I give the camera 4 stars because the camera itself is so good and I have the skills to work around software glitches. (Actually, it's not that difficult. The skills are pretty low if you can follow what I wrote above.) However, if it was my wife's or my mother's camera, there would be no way to fix the situation since not have the skills to easily solve software problems. Once they realize this, both of them will become extremely annoyed with the problems themselves. There is a lot to think about before buying, no matter how good the video quality is.