Today being my first day back to work after a vacation, I can attest that camcorders that use tapes are a pain in the rear. They are a pain when you have to change tapes at the beach, they are a pain when the wife complains for the next six months that you haven’t put the videos on DVD yet.

Sony’s latest HD camcorder is called the HDR-SR5C and it packs a large 100GB HDD inside so no tapes are needed. The camcorder also has a 10x optical zoom along with an 80x digital zoom.

The CMOS sensor is a 2.1 MP ClearVid unit with 1990K effective pixels. I particularly like the idea of the Smooth Slow recording feature that allows you to increase the record rate from 60 fps to 240fps for three seconds and play the video back in 12 seconds. A built in USB 2.0 interface makes it east to send the video to your PC for burning to DVD or storing on your PC via included software. Pre-order on Amazon.com.