The Sony Handycam Dcr-sr40 is an easy to use, lightweight hard drive digital camcorder with 30 GB of storage that can record about seven hours of video. Video is output in a compressed MPEG2 format. The MPEG2 format results in decent, but not excellent, video quality. However, the bonus to this format is it is highly compatible with most third-party video editing software.

Almost all menu functions are accessed through the 2.5 inch touchscreen LCD screen. The Sony Handycam Dcr-sr40 includes 20x optical zoom, (but anything past 10x will probably require a tripod even with the image stabilizer). Unfortunately, still photographs are taken in less than 1 megapixel which is ok if you are just posting them on the Internet, but printing photographs taken with this camcorder is not suggested.  

Critics found the Sony Handycam Dcr-sr40 produced good auto focus and auto exposure; however, the absence of a hotshoe for an external microphone or light is a small short coming. Also, there is no viewfinder, you are forced to use the LCD screen to frame all your shots. Users noticed the bundled software to be relatively useless and preferred other editing programs to finalize their videos. There are also some questions about the video quality considering the format the video is captured in.  

Picture purists should probably look into a hi-def Handycam alternative, but average users will find the Dcr-sr40 to be more than capable of handling all their video capturing needs.