If you like to shoot lots of video and love the look of high-definition, but don’t like transferring video to your computer constantly, Sony may have made the perfect camcorder for you: the Handycam HDR-XR520V.

The first thing you notice about the 520V is the size of the hard drive: 240GB. That means that at the highest resolution — 1920 X 1080 — you could shoot more than 29 hours of video. That’s staggering for a camera of this size. Most camcorders in this class are lucky to have half that size drive (and, in fact, its little brother, the 500V, has exactly that). And you can add even more than that with a memory stick.

The camcorder features other very nice specs, including 12x optical zoom (which is much better, and clearer, than electronic zooms) and optical image stabilization (again, superior to electronic image stabilization.) That’s a big zoom range, and allows you to get in very close.

It even has a built-in GPS to track your location and electronically tag where you shot your videos. Frankly, I’m not sure about the value of a feature like this in a camcorder, but it’s there if you want it. It just doesn’t seem, to me, to be a needed feature.

The downside of all this is the price. It’s more than $1,000, and the 500V isn’t that much less. If you’re a weekend warrior-type shooter, and want to take vacation and birthday videos, you can get very nice camcorders for considerably less. If you shoot a lot, however, and value HD a lot, this is worth a look.