sony hdr-xr500 vs sony hdr-cx520

Hi

I am about to buy one of these camcorders (hdr-xr500 or hdr-cx520). They have the same price on sony web site and actually you can find the hdr-xr500 with a cheaper price on amazon. I compared 2 cameras and they are almost the same . You can compare from the link below
http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&categoryId=3556&N=4294966231
There are just some slight differences

hdr-xr500 has 120 GB and hdr-cx520 has 64 GB capacity
hdr-xr500 has view finder hdr-cx520 does not have
hdr-xr500 has better lcd
Only advantage of hdr-cx520 is, it is a little bit smaller
hdr-cx520 62 x 65 x 133mm and hdr-xr500 71 x 75 x 137mm and hdr-cx520 is 100 gr lighter

The point I can not understand is if hdr-cx520 has no advantages over xr500 , why sony released this new version. I can buy hdr-xr500 with a cheaper price and with some extra tools and it has 1x more recording capacity over hdr-cx520.

I want to buy the better one even it is 100-200 dollars more but I don't want to pay more and buy just a new version with no advantages.

Any comments will be usefull, please do not hesitate to make comments. Thanks in advance

Hi,

I was chosing between the same two camcorders a couple weeks ago.
I chose the CX for the following reasons:

-smaller size
-flash memory (less chance of failing compared to hard drive, because there are no moving parts)
-they added a third dimension to the image stabilization
-the screen controls are all touch screen
-didn't care for the viewfinder
-liked the placement of zoom, photo, mode, manual controls better

But, this is just my personal preference.

Neil

thank you so much for the answer.

I also think cx looks better but there is only one thing that my friend warned me about. Everything is over the lcd screen and there are no buttons. If something happens to LCD then you will not be able to use the camcorder until you fix it. By the way I also called sony but they dont know the difference between these two models, thank you so much for telling me about the difference about the image stabilization.