Sony Bloggie Touch MHS-TS20

Playback (3.75)

Playback mode on the Bloggie Touch is setup like most camcorders with touch-screen interfaces. Clips are arranged as little thumbnail images and you click on them to play the videos at full screen. The thing about the Bloggie Touch, though, is that you can display clips holding the camcorder either horizontally or vertically. Depending on how you shot the clips (horizontally or vertically) they will fill the screen differently. For example, a clip shot holding the Touch horizontally will playback full screen with the camcorder held horizontally. We like this setup and we think it makes great use of the large LCD on the Bloggie Touch, but we do wish there was a way to turn off the camcorder's auto rotate feature. Sometimes we would hold the camcorder and the video clip would rotate to vertical playback when we didn't really want it to.

The VCR controls on the camcorder are touch-screen buttons and they are very basic. No slow motion or frame-by-frame options will be found here, but there is a progress bar that you can slide to get to a specific point in a video (it isn't very precise, though). There are also fastforward and rewind buttons.

Playback mode

In playback mode you can access the "share it later" features on the Bloggie Touch for tagging specific videos for uploading to the internet or sharing with friends. Simply tagging your clips for YouTube will not immediately upload those videos—you must connect the camcorder to a computer first and run the built-in software. We outline this operation in more detail in the Editing section of this review.

Connectivity (1.50)

There's not much to talk about as far as connectivity features go on the Bloggie Touch. The camcorder has just two terminals: a built-in USB arm and an HDMI port. Let's start with the USB arm, which is located on the bottom of the Bloggie Touch and is clearly designed with the Flip camcorders in mind. The difference with the Bloggie Touch, however, is that the USB arm does not release via a switch or lock. Instead, you push on the edge of the arm and the USB port flips out. You tuck the arm back into the camcorder in the same manner. We like this setup because we think it is harder to break than the button-release system you see on Flip camcorders (still, it is more fragile than a regular USB terminal would be).

The USB arm tucks into the bottom of the camcorder and snaps out when you press it.

Since the USB arm doesn't extend out from the Bloggie Touch very far, Sony kindly ships a small USB extender with the camcorder. The extender is only five or six inches long, but it should get the job done for most camcorder-to-computer connections. Remember, though, the Bloggie Touch doesn't have a DC-input, so you must charge it via USB. And that's an area where the little extender cable comes in handy.

The HDMI terminal is the only video output on the camcorder.

Taking a gander of the thin left side of the Bloggie Touch and you'll find a tiny flip-down door that houses the HDMI input. The port is tiny, and its cover isn't reliably strong, but we like the placement of the input as its position allows it to blend into the streamlined design of the camcorder. Unfortunately, the Bloggie Touch has no other video-output ports other than HDMI, so you're out of luck if want to hook up the camcorder to a standard definition TV.

Sony Bloggie Touch Comparisons
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