Sony Net Sharing Cam – The You Tube and Video Blogging Camcorder

Thanks to the popularity of social networking sties, You Tube and video blogs we have seen a number of manufacturers turn their attention to what is undoubtedly a ever growing and extremely lucrative market – and now Sony is entering the fray with its sleek Net Sharing Cam.

According to Kelly Davis, director of product marketing at Sony Electronics ‘People who upload videos frequently are looking for solutions to easily get their personal content online in a few simple steps, so we developed the Net-Sharing CAM to be intuitive…It can be used as an everyday communication device, which can also be personalized to quickly share short video clips and photos online.’

Whilst camcorders such as the previously featured Sanyo Xacti E1 are arguably not solely aimed at the You Tube generation we have seen the emergence of other camcorders designed from the outset for those looking to film content primarily for the purposes of uploading and sharing, such as the Pure Video Flip Camcoder and it’s products such as this that the new Sony Net Sharing Cam must compete against.

And, certainly, from an aesthetic perspective alone, the Sony device certainly looks the part with its sleek, black gloss finish and fold out 2.4 inch colour LCD screen.

The Sony Net Sharing Cam weighs in at a mere five ounces and measures 1 3/16” (width) x 4 1/8” (height) x 2 1/422 (depth). And, like the Flip Camcorder, Sony’s device offers the ability to upload videos with the minimum of fuss – in either QVGA resolution at 15fps or VGA resolution at 30fps in MPEG-4 format – to sites such as You Tube or personal blogs whilst also offering digital stills at rated at 5 Megapixels.

The Net Sharing Cam relies on Sony’s Memory Stick Pro Duo media cards for storage and will store up to five hours of ‘web ready’ footage when using a 2GB card at default settings.

Interestingly, the Net Sharing Cam also comes with separate buttons for stills and video clips (so no need to select modes before shooting) and includes a ‘Sharemark’ button that tags clips and pictures as being intended to share so that the camcorder’s inbuilt PMP software will automatically recognise tagged files which can then be directly uploaded via pre-programmed presets or even personal blogs.

The Sony Net Sharing Camcorder retails for around $150.