Growing up, I was always a fan of Trivial Pursuit, Young Players Edition.  But as I aged, the questions got easier and outdated (no free upgrades with the standard board games).  When I married, I inherited Trivial Pursuit, Genius Edition from my wife.  This brought a whole bunch of new questions into my life.

Hasbro has been releasing some of their more popular games on the video game consoles.  This is great news for me because it’s less work to store and maintain the standard boxed games.  In short, Hasbro has done a very nice job bringing Trival Pursuit to the XBox 360 platform.

The questions included in the game are current and relevant.  So far, I’ve seen questions as current as the late 2008’s.  So that’s good news.  No more questions about the “current” USSR.  There’s been one free download of additional movie questions. I hope they keep up this trend, although I hear that they’re going to charge for some future updates.

The game moves fast.  The rolling of the dice is fast, and that helps move the game faster.  There are a few things that still slows it down for me:

Landing on roll again results in a “please roll again” prompt.  It would be nice if it just showed the text and let the user continue with the rolling.  The extra click, while minor, is annoying and when it appears, I’m clicking as fast as possible to get to the roll because I know I landed on “roll again”.  Also, the movement of the pieces can be slow.  Some of the animations are nice and quick (like the submarine one), but others are slow (like the helicopter).  So an option to remove or speed-up the animations would be nice.

After you roll, the board does a nice job of highlighting which spots the player can move to.  However, the selection of where to move to is unusual for this sort of game.  When selecting, you move a cursor around the screen.  But since you’re limited to the number of spots, why have to make the user move the cursor from one spot to another.  By this I mean you have to hold the left-stick while the cursor “moves” from one spot to another.  You should just be able to iterate through the available spots using the sticks.

The questions are multiple choice.  Being not the greatest at trivia, it really helps me to have choices to the questions.  Sometimes, I would really want someone to give me some choices with my old game because I knew the answer, but I just couldn’t find the right words for it.  And even though the questions are multiple choice, it’s still not dirt-easy.  I like it.  So far, I’m tending at 45% correct (according to the game-recorded stats).

There are some picture-oriented questions as well.  I like this too.  However, the images are too small and the zoomed-in version only appears on-screen for a very short period of time.  It would be nice to be able to get a closer look at the images (even on my 50” HDTV plasma screen).

The map questions, while a nice addition, are almost always annoying.  Why, when answering a Hobbies and Games question must I be able to locate New York on a map when you really just need to know that New York is the answer.  The map pins are not labelled, so if you don’t know the correct geographical location, even if you know the correct answer, you’re screwed.

The last nice thing about this game is that it’s possible to play with the sound down low.  It’s great because after a while the sounds get annoying.  But it’s also great because you can play it while your baby is sleeping in your arms.

Summary

The Good

Updatable Questions, fast games

The Bad

Map questions annoying, images too small

Rating

7.5 / 10.0

My general experience with camcorders has been relatively low.  I was limited to my dad's Sony Hi8 camcorder (the one with the rumoured x-ray night-vision capabilities) and my sister-in-law's Panasonic Mini-DV camcorder.

But, with a little one on the way, I figured it was a good idea to get a camcorder for my own home.

Being one for the toys, and due to the fact that I have an HDTV television, I obviously wanted to get a camcorder that can record in HD.  After some research, I settled on the Sony HDR-SR12 camcorder.  I didn't want to deal with tapes, and the idea of being able to record more than 10 hours without switching tapes appealed to me.

Video

The picture quality of the camcorder is very good.  This camcorder records as an MPEG AVCHD stream.  I've been recording at FQ quality (top) in HD. 

The 12x optical zoom is very good.  I have digital zoom disabled, but I can still zoom way into the Statue of Liberty and see it pretty good when I'm on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building.

This device has a face detection feature where it will attempt to improve recording quality around peoples faces.  You can see it in action by the squares that appear around people as you're recording them.

This camcorder can also take photographs.  There's two ways to do this:

1. While in video mode, there's a quick photo button you can press to take a quick picture.  This is good because you can take a photo while you're recording video.  The bad is that the photo's aspect ratio is those of the recorded video: 16:9.  The camera is also quite slow at saving photos taken this way to the hard drive.
2. The "on" dial also doubles as a toggle for video and photo modes.  When in photo mode, any photos taken are in a "normal" aspect ratio.

Another feature of this camera is SteadyShot.  This is where the camera will automatically reduce shake and wobbling do to my unsteady hands.  I must say that it works very well.  Not as well as a tripod, and not very well when in a moving vehicle, but when standing still, movement is reduced to a minimum.

I found the focus to be pretty quick when lighting was good.  However, in dark areas, the focus was quite slow.

Audio

This camera records in both 2.0 and 5.1 sound.  The mic pick-up is pretty good.  Although it's almost too good at picking up the camera-man's voice.  There is a zoom mic feature which I have not played with too much.

Menus

The on-camera menus are pretty easy to navigate.  The screen is touch-screen, so there aren't any dials or arrow buttons to work your way though.

However, I find that there are a few different paths in the configuration and you have to remember which one gets you where.  That gets a bit confusing.

Battery Life

The included battery lasts about 80 to 90 minutes before it needs to be recharged.  Recharging requires plugging the camcorder into a wall outlet.  I would have preferred a separate charger to be included (you can purchase one from Sony).

Viewing Your Clips

Because the camcorder is hard-drive-based, you either have to watch the videos on the camcorder view screen, on a television, or connect it to a computer.

View Screen

Watching your clips on the camcorder's screen is pretty easy.  There's a "play" button on screen that you can use to get into play mode.  Once there, your clips are organized by date quite nicely. 

Each clip stars where you started recording and stops when you stop recording.  However, once a clip hits 16 minutes, it'll be split into 16 minute-size clips.  When playing back clips though, the device seamlessly plays clips in succession as the previous one ends.  So it's as if you're watching your recordings on tape.

Another nice feature is the face index mode which will separate your clips based on changes in the faces that appear in the video.  So as you move around a room, and people move on-screen then off, the camera will separate those segments for you.

Connecting to the PC

The camcorder connects to a PC by a USB 2.0 connection.  This can happen in two ways:

1. The camcorder has a USB port on the camera itself, or
2. The camcorder comes with a mini cradle that connects to the PC via USB

Both options work identically from the computer's point of view.  The only difference is your preference of using the cradle or not.  One complaint I have with the cradle is that you cannot have the camcorder plugged in when it's sitting in the cradle.  This means that if you need to recharge the camcorder, or if you're downloading many clips and may run out of battery juice, then you need to use the direct USB port on the device.

When you download a clip from the camera, it's downloaded as an M2TS file.  I would have preferred if it was AVI, like most digital cameras support.  This makes the files a bit more accessible to people.

I can import all the M2TS files into Sony Vegas 8.0b.

Connecting to a Television

The camcorder includes an HDMI port and a port for connecting white/red/yellow RCA-jacks.  The former gives you great HD picture of all your clips.  The latter downgrades the image to SD.  Note that a white/red/yellow cable is included in the box, but an HDMI cable is not.

Included Software

The bundled CD includes software, Picture Motion Browser, to download, view, organize clips, and burn clips to DVD from the camcorder to my PC. 

When you download the clips to your PC, the included software automatically "analyzes" the clips.  However, I find that for every clip downloaded, it tells me the clip could not be analyzed.  I don't know why and Sony email support could not help me.  They told me to contact Sony phone support, which I have not done yet.  So at this point, I don't know what analyzing does.

My PC specs are 3.2 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor, 2 GB RAM, nVidia 6600 128 MB video card.  (I do not have a BluRay burner, so I cannot burn these videos to BD.  One day...)

Using the supplied software to view the clips, I find that the computer just barely plays them without stuttering.  If anything else is going on at the same time, the playback will be jerky.  This I attribute to the AVCHD video codec used to compress the video.  I know from experience that this codec is very processor intensive.

The included software for organizing the clips also cannot display a thumbnail for the clips correctly.  It shows the thumbnail as a "broken" image.  The software will correctly convert the files to lower resolution MPG files though and those display thumbnails correctly.

Similarly to the analyzing and thumbnails, burning clips to DVD fails.  The software tells me that the clips are unsupported file types.  I know that DVD's don't directly support M2TS files, however, the software should be good enough to convert the files to MPEG-2 files first.

I prefer to use Nero and Sony Vegas to do my merging, conversions, and burning to DVD.  I also with the bundled software could splice together your clips as if you were watching them on the camera itself.

Conclusion

I love this camera.  However, I recognize that if you're not technically minded, you may want to stick with Mini-DV or DVD camcorders.  The bundled software is not good enough for the normal user though.

I have not tested the camera's hard drive protection mechanism for dropping it.  I like it too much.