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Sony camcorders focus on high-def smiles

A clever newfunction in Sony's latest HD TV camcorders promises brighter smiles and clearermugshots thanks to a variation on the increasingly common face-detectiontechnology.

The ¥170,000 (£815)HDRSR12 and ¥150,000 (£720) HDR-SR11, which were shown at CES last week andgiven their first on-sale date (20 February) today in Japan, record to harddrives or MemorySticks using AVCHD.

Smile, you're in high def

During the encodingprocess they take the areas identified as faces and compress them less,resulting in sharper images in those areas. Aside from that neat trick, boththe new models represent the usual progress in the high-definition camcordermarket.

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Each shoots up to 1920 x 1080i-pixel video and10.2-megapixel still shots. The difference between the pair lies in the storage- the SR12 has a 120GB drive that can hold 15 hours of full-resolution video,whereas the SR11 squeezes 7 hours into half the capacity.