When we were looking at hotels in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, we had two choices: either we stay at a major hotel chain or we stay at a boutique hotel. Since we wanted a more personal touch, we chose a boutique hotel.

Our first step was to research which boutique hotel could offer us the best value for money. We went through tripadvisor.com, as well as googling many other sites about boutique hotels in Chiang Mai, then we emailed the hotels that we had short-listed, and based on the replies we chose to stay at Sira Boutique Hotel for 6 out of the 10 days we were there.

One thing we’ve found is that if a boutique hotel or other business replies promptly and politely, it usually means that the person is friendly and good to do business with. We arrived at the airport at around 8am and a driver was waiting to pick us up and take us to the hotel. They gave us no problems for the early check-in and we also had an early breakfast on arrival.

Initially Grace was (very!) reluctant to stay as she found the bed quite hard compared to what she’s used to. I was ok with that as I’ve slept on far harder beds before. And while it did give her a bit of a backache the first nights, we made sure to treat that with a trip to the spa

The best thing about the hotel was the friendly staff! Everyone from the receptionist to the owners were very accommodating and helpful, and near the end of our stay I had a very interesting discussion with Robb (the owner), who bought over the hotel a few months ago and is in the process of making it a truly cozy boutique hotel. He explained to me about the current business situation in Thailand, the history of Chiang Mai, and a lot more!

After moving to our second hotel “The Field Village”, we missed the friendliness of the staff at Sira, and if we would have stayed longer, we would have gone back!!!

A while back I said I would review what I like and dislike about this camera. Before I reviewed it though, I wanted to have enough experience using it so that I could give an opinion based on more than an initial impression.

Main reasons why we chose this camera:

1. It is light, small
2. Has a built-in 60gb HDD
3. Has some of the most advanced consumer/prosumer camcorder features including recording to HD format.
4. Another plus, was the fact that sony had some accessories for this camera like a bluetooth mic which could easily be added without any cumbersome cables

After our first trip to HK and Macau, we realized that even with the two small batteries that came with the camera, we didn’t have enough juice to cover a full day of filming so we went and bought the most powerful battery available. It’s a bulky battery and juts out of the back of the camera, but it lasts 4-6 hours which is great

Side view with the huge battery jutting out of the back

The photo button is at the top where my index finger is, and the video button is on the back where my thumb is.

 

There’s a flash at the front, and also a button to activate backlight compensation. That button would have been better placed on the back!

 

Here are some of the things I like about the camera:

• It’s small and compact
• It can take pictures at 4 mega pixels even when recording videos
• It has a mic and earphone jack which many small cams don’t
• It has a special connector for Sony accessories like the bluetooth mic
• The 10x zoom covers most of our needs
• Because of the built-in hard disk it’s easy to upload the videos to the computer
• 60GB holds so many hours of footage when recording SD that we can go for weeks without deleting anything

There are many pros to this camera, but there are also some bothersome problems:

• The manual focus is so cumbersome to use that it just isn’t practical
• The auto focus can be very frustrating when filming nature as it may focus on a branch close by rather than the animal behind it - this is the single most frustrating thing I’ve found with this camera
• The auto focus in the dark is so slow that it makes it very hard to film at night or in low light conditions
• There is a lot of electric noise in low light conditions
• Even on a sunny day the shutter speed of the still camera isn’t too fast and can lead to blurred shots
• The HD format is not recognized by any editing software except Sony’s!

In summary, this is probably the best camcorder of its size, but I would really like to see one that allows better manual controls of focus, aperture, etc. Also, I want to use the HD footage I film without converting it!

Sony, please let Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut support this format!