Panasonic HDC-TM60 Camcorder (Black)
Panasonic SDR-T55 Camcorder (Black)
Panasonic HDC-SD90K 3D Compatible SD Memory Camcorder (Black)
- 28mm wide-angle lens
- Intelligent 40x Zoom and Hybrid O.I.S.
- 2D & 3D video capture capability
- SDXC/SDHC/SD Memory Card Recording
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Panasonic HDC-TM80K HD Twin Memory Camcorder (Black)
- Intelligent 42x Zoom and HYBRID O.I.S.
- 33.7mm Wide Angle Lens
- Zoom Mic and Wind Noise Canceller
- 16GB built-in memory
- SDXC/SDHC/SD Memory Card Recording
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Panasonic HDC-TM60 Camcorder (Black)
Panasonic HDC-HS80K HD HDD Camcorder (Black)
The Panasonic HDC-HS80 HDD High Definition Camcorder covers a wide range of shooting situations from close distances to faraway subjects. Using Intelligent Zoom that employs super-high resolution technology and the Crystal Engine PRO it offers ultra-telephoto Intelligent Zoom shooting to exceed the magnification range of the optical zoom up to a high-powered 42x zoom. It also features a 33.7mm wide-angle lens. to realize shooting at a close distance from the subject while fitting both the subject and the surrounding area into the frame. 35mm camera equivalent. HYBRID O.I.S. is a optical/electrical image stabilization system. Further to blurring by vertical/horizontal wrist movements it detects subtle blurring by vertical/horizontal entire arm movement and corrects them using a lens in the optical system and a sensor in electrical system. In electrical image stabilization utilizing an unused area of the sensor when zooming suppresses image degradation. Powerful correction realizes beautiful images even when shooting on the move or zooming.
The evolved Zoom Mic links the microphone's action to the camera's action. When zooming in on a bird in the distance for example the microphones also zoom in on the bird in link with the lens zooming operation. The function also reduces the surrounding noise to about 1/3 (-10 dB)* that of conventional models and realizes recording the sounds with superb clarity. The Wind Noise Canceller automatically detects and suppresses only wind noise to ensure natural sounds. In comparison with 2ch camcorders (SD600/TM60/HS60/SD60). The iA (Intelligent Auto) consists of six functions: Face Recognition new HYBRID O.I.S. AF/AE Tracking Intelligent Scene Selector Face Detection and Intelligent Contrast Control senses the shooting conditions and automatically makes the settings and activates functions that will deliver optimal results. With both motion and still images iA does the bothersome set
- Intelligent 42x Zoom and HYBRID O.I.S.
- 33.7mm Wide Angle Lens
- Zoom Mic and Wind Noise Canceller
- 120GB HDD
- SDXC/SDHC/SD Memory Card Recording
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Panasonic HDC-HS300 HDD HD Camcorder (Black)
- Capture Full HD video; 1920 x 1080 resolution
- Records to 120 GB built-in Hard Disk Drive or SD/SDHC Memory Card (not included)
- 12x Leica Dicomar lens with Optical Image Stabilization
- Capture stills up to 10.6 megapixels
- 2.7-inch widescreen touch-panel LCD
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Panasonic HDC-HS300 HDD HD Camcorder (Black)
- Capture Full HD video; 1920 x 1080 resolution
- Records to 120 GB built-in Hard Disk Drive or SD/SDHC Memory Card (not included)
- 12x Leica Dicomar lens with Optical Image Stabilization
- Capture stills up to 10.6 megapixels
- 2.7-inch widescreen touch-panel LCD
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Panasonic HDC-TM10K Hard Drive Full HD Camcorder (Black)
- Captures 1080p HD video
- Super-compact design; weighs only 1/2 pound
- Intelligent Auto mode takes the guess-work out of recording and allows anyone to record picture perfect moments
- 16x Optical Image Stabilized zoom with Active mode anticipates your movement to correct jitters and shakes and allow smooth movement when recording
- Dual Memory options: record to 8 GB built-in memory or the SD/SDHC memory cards (not included)
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Panasonic HDC-HS250-K Hard Drive High Definition Camcorder (Black)
- AVCHD is a standard developed jointly by Sony and Panasonic for HD digital camcorders.
- 120 GB Shock-Mounted Hard Disc Drive: Panasonic SD card/hard-drive camcorders are ideal for travel
- Built-in SD / SDHC Memory Card Drive: SD memory cards are incredibly versatile
- 3MOS Camera System (3 x 3.05 Megapixels): The HS250 features three of Panasonic's new 1/4.1-inch 3050000-pixel MOS sensors.
- Shoot in Lighting as Low as 1.6 Lux: You can shoot clear shots in lighting as low as 1.6 lx. With the 3MOS Sensor
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Panasonic SDR-S26 SD Camcorder (Black)
- 1CCD camera system
- Records to SD/SDHC memory cards
- 70x optical zoom; 100x digital zoom
- Intelligent Auto Mode automatically selects Face Detection Scene Selector Optical Image Stabilizer and Intelligent Contrast Control
- 2.7-inch widescreen touch-panel LCD
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Panasonic SDR-H80 SD and HDD Camcorder (Black)
- 1CCD camera system
- Records to 60 GB built-in Hard Disk Drive or SD memory cards
- 70x optical zoom; 100x digital zoom
- Intelligent Auto Mode automatically selects Face Detection Scene Selector Optical Image Stabilizer and Intelligent Contrast Control
- 2.7-inch widescreen touch-panel LCD
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Panasonic HDC-TM10K Hard Drive Full HD Camcorder (Black)
Mixed bag: know what you're using it for
First the two versions of this camera are identical other than the fact that one has built in memory the other does not. BUT consider how much you're paying for that memory? Could you just buy a larger card with the price difference? Probably. Considering that for the sake of convenience you will probably be recording to cards most of the time (so you can just plug them into the computer) I would probably go for the internal memory-less version.
I ran several tests on the camera for a few days to try out its features. I am not a name-brand fanboy nor am I a dedicated videophile. I'm just going to give you an unbiased impression based upon what my eyes saw:
PROS:
1.)Pretty good daylight recording. Considering what I paid for it I was surprised by the quality. It's not a Canon S10 by any means but I was pleased.
2.)It is unbelievably small and light. Shockingly so. If you are looking for the smallest possible 1080p capable camera to take on a daylight hike I'm thinking this is near the top of the list.
3.)Has a few of the bells and whistles of a larger camera including the ability to swap out memory cards a decent touch-screen menu interface where you can play with the settings (as opposed to some of these cheap-o cameras) a genuine optical zoom and an HDMI output right on the camera. Unlike most I had no problem with the touchscreen.
4.)Quick power-on/off feature works really well battery life was not a problem.
CONS:
1.)You'll notice I mentioned how surprised I was by the camera's performance in daylight? I was equally surprised by the nighttime/indoor performance. As in it was atrocious. Absolutely atrocious. We're talking awful pixelation terrible graininess significant artifacting and block-iness and a general inability to see anything. The onboard light provided little help. I'm not talking about near pitch black rooms I'm talking about normally lit indoor areas. The camera is basically useless for indoor or nighttime recording unless you're using multiple floodlights. I would walk through the house and even our well lit dining room had significant problems.
I chalk this up to the tiny sensor (less than 2 megapixels) and tiny lens. Sure it keeps the weight/size factor miniscule but it really hurts performance. I am not understating this problem at all. I tried to use the manual shuttings (such as they are) to correct the problem but playing with frame rates settings and modes made little to no difference.
2.)No built-in lens protector. Having a dangling lenscap to annoy you defeats some of the purpose of having such a compact easy to whip out camera.
3.)Screen tearing/rolling shudder is a problem on quick pans even more so than other CMOS cameras I've tried. I'm not sure what the issue is but be forewarned.
4.)The cameras awful low light capabilities make most of the individualized settings useless.
5.)If you want to make that final jump from 1080i to 1080p you're limited to the "digital cinema" mode that disables the vast majority of the manual settings. A small nitpick but somewhat annoying.
SUMMARY
Know precisely what you're going to be using this camera for before you buy it. The video quality in daylight for the price is pretty decent the form factor/size is phenomenal and the indoor/low light video quality and options are horrendous. Basically if you're only going to be using it outdoors and size is of paramount important it's worthy of consideration.More detail ...
Panasonic HDC-TM10K Hard Drive Full HD Camcorder (Black)
Mixed bag: know what you're using it for
First the two versions of this camera are identical other than the fact that one has built in memory the other does not. BUT consider how much you're paying for that memory? Could you just buy a larger card with the price difference? Probably. Considering that for the sake of convenience you will probably be recording to cards most of the time (so you can just plug them into the computer) I would probably go for the internal memory-less version.
I ran several tests on the camera for a few days to try out its features. I am not a name-brand fanboy nor am I a dedicated videophile. I'm just going to give you an unbiased impression based upon what my eyes saw:
PROS:
1.)Pretty good daylight recording. Considering what I paid for it I was surprised by the quality. It's not a Canon S10 by any means but I was pleased.
2.)It is unbelievably small and light. Shockingly so. If you are looking for the smallest possible 1080p capable camera to take on a daylight hike I'm thinking this is near the top of the list.
3.)Has a few of the bells and whistles of a larger camera including the ability to swap out memory cards a decent touch-screen menu interface where you can play with the settings (as opposed to some of these cheap-o cameras) a genuine optical zoom and an HDMI output right on the camera. Unlike most I had no problem with the touchscreen.
4.)Quick power-on/off feature works really well battery life was not a problem.
CONS:
1.)You'll notice I mentioned how surprised I was by the camera's performance in daylight? I was equally surprised by the nighttime/indoor performance. As in it was atrocious. Absolutely atrocious. We're talking awful pixelation terrible graininess significant artifacting and block-iness and a general inability to see anything. The onboard light provided little help. I'm not talking about near pitch black rooms I'm talking about normally lit indoor areas. The camera is basically useless for indoor or nighttime recording unless you're using multiple floodlights. I would walk through the house and even our well lit dining room had significant problems.
I chalk this up to the tiny sensor (less than 2 megapixels) and tiny lens. Sure it keeps the weight/size factor miniscule but it really hurts performance. I am not understating this problem at all. I tried to use the manual shuttings (such as they are) to correct the problem but playing with frame rates settings and modes made little to no difference.
2.)No built-in lens protector. Having a dangling lenscap to annoy you defeats some of the purpose of having such a compact easy to whip out camera.
3.)Screen tearing/rolling shudder is a problem on quick pans even more so than other CMOS cameras I've tried. I'm not sure what the issue is but be forewarned.
4.)The cameras awful low light capabilities make most of the individualized settings useless.
5.)If you want to make that final jump from 1080i to 1080p you're limited to the "digital cinema" mode that disables the vast majority of the manual settings. A small nitpick but somewhat annoying.
SUMMARY
Know precisely what you're going to be using this camera for before you buy it. The video quality in daylight for the price is pretty decent the form factor/size is phenomenal and the indoor/low light video quality and options are horrendous. Basically if you're only going to be using it outdoors and size is of paramount important it's worthy of consideration. More detail ...
Panasonic HDC-HS250-K HHD HD Camcorder (Black)
Great Camcorder still needs some improvement
I got this camcorder for about two weeks already. It's very easy to start operating it even without reading the manual. The touch screen feature is great! You can basically play on the touch screen and see the difference of the picture quality right on the screen. Here's some of the Pro & Con that I think after playing with this camcorder.
Pro:
-Easy to use
-Great video quality (I hook on my Sony 48 inches 1080p LCD screen the picture looks great!)
-Picture quality is great too if you got enough light when using indoor (outdoor no problem)
-Indoor video recording is pretty good using backlight function if indoor light is not enough.
-Outdoor video quality is excellent
-Digital zooming is great (I can basically zoom in and get so detail that I can see the pore of the person's face right across of the street with 3 traffic lane in between it.)
-LCD touch screen is great (you can flip the screen too! You can also use fingernail to touch the screen if your fingertip is too big the screen don't have any problem recognizing your command.)
Con:
-Not enough battery life (got around 90minutes of recording good thing is that you can see how much time you got left on the LCD screen for recording so you'll know when you need to charge the battery or switch to power cord or new battery.)
-You cannot charge the battery while using power cord!
-The power cord plug on the camcorder is hidden underneath where you put the battery at so you cannot use both battery and power cord at the same time (very bad when you try to record using power cord once you accidentally pull the power cord plug all of the recording stops and it takes long time for camcorder to get back to recording and it also causes temporary hard drive malfunction while the camcorder trying to recover what you just record.)
-You cannot turn on the light that came with the camcorder to do the recording (it's use mostly as flash function when taking picture)
So far that's what I thought playing for two weeks (without reading the manual.)
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Panasonic HDC-TM300 Twin Media HD Camcorder (Black)
Almost a Prosumer Camcorder
I bought this camcorder to replace a Sony DSR-PD170. I needed to switch to from miniDV/DVCAM to HD and in the process I wanted to go to flash media. There are very few choices right now. Panasonic's AG-HMC70U is a gigantic monster compared to my DSR-PD170 and the new Panasonics and JVCs aren't getting the greatest reviews - so I looked at the consumer camcorders.
I wanted 3CCDs and XLR inputs but no XLR on a consumer camcorder so I'm using a Studio One stereo mini to XLR box. The CCD vs. MOS isn't important to me as long as I get 3 sensors. This is the only 3-sensor consumer camcorder using flash media I could find.
The quality is good and I would say it's at the top of the consumer camcorder heap at this point. AVCHD is great for good quality with a very small file size but make sure your editing software can handle the MTS format.
Panasonic supplies a utility that gives you some preformatting options when you download your video from the camera but I'm not using it.
Here's how the camera records: Each time you record it creates an mts file (AVCHD) if you pause and then continue it writes the first file and starts a new one. So you end up with a lot of sequentially numbered MTS files. I just download them to my PC without any pre-processing and import them into Premiere Pro CS4 (it reads the mts files with no problem). You just put them in order on the timeline.
I am so happy to be done with tapes. The last vestiges of an ancient era in video processing. No more capturing video from the camcorder. Just lay the files into the timeline and edit them there.
Just for the heck of it I tried to upload the mts files directly to YouTube. YouTube accepts the files and transcodes them but they are very choppy dropping frames left and right once on YouTube. So I bought a batch converter that converts them to 720p MPEG 2 files and that makes YouTube happy.
So is the Panasonic HDC-TM300 a pro camcorder? Not hardly. Is it a prosumer camcorder? Not really. But it's a good choice if you want good quality HD video at a low price (compared to pro camcorders).
On the other hand I just used this camera to record a 6-hour workshop in a hotel with not-so-great lighting. The video was very washed out - not even close to the low-light quality of my Sony DSR-PD170. The TM-300 has a manual iris/gain feature that lets you open up to 18db. Surprisingly the brightness improves significantly without getting too grainy. Still not close to the PD170 in auto mode but significantly better than the TM-300's auto mode.
I would have liked to have replaced my Sony with a Panasonic AG-HMC150 but at $3800 I just wasn't ready for the price. Although the TM-300 isn't quite good enough to cause me to get rid of my PD170 it's good enough to make it my camcorder of choice in well-lit shooting environments.
The Panasonic HDC-TM300 is a really great consumer camcorder that's well-worth the price.More detail ...
Panasonic HDC-HS300 HDD HD Camcorder (Black)
Great job by Panasonic
This the first review I have felt was worth the time to do. I have have worked in several fields of photography over a 37 year career that include motion picture commercial catalogs and aerial mapping. I am also an avid amateur nature photographer. I lost count of how many film and video cameras I have purchased over the years. My last camera was a JVC model GR-DV3000 and 3.5 years old. It was a very good camcorder. I read several reviews on the Panasonic DHC HS300 before purchasing it. I is an outstanding piece of engineering. It work great right out of the box. I purchased the camera on July 6 and used it extensively on a recent trip to Las Vegas. The results from daylight and night time shooting is superb.
Pros: There are so many good features it is difficult to determine where to start. Switching from Video to Stills is easy and smooth. The touch screen is a big plus in navigating through the various menus. For the advanced user the are numerous manual options to chose from. The 10..6 megapixel stills are better that my 8.2 megapixel Canon D20 digital still camera. I purchased a 16 GB Transcend SDHC card to compliment the 120 GB internal hard drive. I used both the hard drive and the card in Vegas. It is very easy to transfer files from one to another. The video and still files work well with editing software. I use CyberLink Power Director 7 Ultra. Cables are provided to link up to HD TVs and pro logic receivers with the HDMI mini. Other cables are also provided. The thumb nails provide easy access to the video clips and stills.
Cons: The camera button and touch screen might pose some difficulty for a person with large hands. In this case the stylus to navigate the touch screen is necessary. Do not buy the filter sets that use a reduction ring from 43 mm to 37 mm. You end up with vignetting at the wide angle setting. I purchased Tiffen 43 mm filters. The additional Tele and Wide angle lenses are not worth the money. There is no neck strap or case available for this camera. Therefore I purchase a Lowpro gadget bag. It can be used as a fanny pack this a belt.
Conclusion: A bit pricey but Panasonic has put together a great overall package. More detail ...
Panasonic SDR-S26 SD Camcorder (Black)
Don't Be Confused O.I.S. vs. E.I.S. and Camcorder Movement!
This Panasonic SDR-S26 camcorder is by far the best you can buy for the price and is rated best camcorder of 2009 CES!
I have owned a few others and none of them had true O.I.S. (Optical Image Stabilization) and I assure you that this one does. My others had E.I.S. (Electronic Image Stabilization) and believe me there is a big difference. I have noticed a few other reviews on this camcorder and some say the image stabilization works great out to 20x and good to 40x 70x is still tripod territory. That's good advise as a tripod will assist in producing great videos with virtually no camcorder movement. Please don't be confused between the O.I.S and plain old camcorder movement with camcorder movement at 70x optical zoom the object that you are looking at may move somewhat due to arm and body movement BUT notice with O.I.S. the image remains clear and crisp with great detail even with some hand shakiness. With E.I.S camcorders which usually have less zoom capabilities approx. 40x optical zoom you'd notice while zoomed out not only is there camcorder movement BUT the image is also a bit blurry and has limited detail due in part to hand shakiness. So don't be confused or fooled by plain camcorder movement or the difference between O.I.S vs. E.I.S as Panasonic's SDR-S26 with O.I.S and 70x optical zoom will absolutely exceed your expectations as did mine and amaze you with a spectacular camcorder experience. I am an extremely satisfied owner of the Panasonic SDR-S26 Camcorder and I know you will be also.
You can also search the WEB for the Panasonic sdr-s26 and view some of the you-tube video zoom tests that were performed by camcorder owners and see the quality of the O.I.S. and the 70x optical zoom for yourself.
P.S. Don't forget to pick up a SD/SDHC flash memory card (preferably a 16GB priced around $40.00)and possibly an extra battery (part # B-9681 priced around $14.00) both at AMAZON.COM. More detail ...
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