Although Panasonic's
HDC-SD9 is mighty, mighty small, reviewers over at
CNET felt that it fell short in a number of key areas. For starters, Panny included a few quirky design choices; for instance, removing the battery requires the LCD cover to be open, but doing so can also turn the camera on unless you place it in a different mode. Granted, the minuscule size didn't leave the outfit too much to work with, but if you're easily flustered by these kinds of niggles, you can run far, far away right now. As for image quality, critics noted that still shots were marginally better than awful, but capturing full motion HD clips was something it did manage to do relatively well. Overall, no one handling this critter was enthusiastically shouting for joy when all was said and done, so do yourself a favor and eye the review down there before clicking that order button.
posted Apr 17th 2008 7:07PM
I don't know... my dad has the Canon HV10 which uses miniDV tapes and it's awesome. I don't think I could ever switch to a non-tape method of recording home videos. It's one of the few applications where tapes still make the most sense. It's nice to always have a backup copy somewhere. I would hate to have to buy multiple hard drives just to keep a backup of my home movies.
Jeez-- talk about picky. I bought one of these last week to replace my aging Sharp VL-D5000u. It's a very nice camera, even if I still prefer the handling of the relatively huge Sharp to the Panasonic.
So opening the LCD turns on the camera on is a negative? The hard off switch is next to where a user would open the LCD and next to the user's right thumb. No big deal to take out the battery. In any case, you should have a UV filter on the front of the lens which'll help protect the lens.
The annoying "intelligent" pop ups are translucent and easily turned off.
Downloading footage does not necessarily require the removal of the battery, either. You simply remove the SD card and insert it in a card reader. I don't know why anyone would want to download footage via USB.
No mic input is a bit of a bummer, but if I wanted higher-quality sound, I'd pull out my Roland DAW and condenser mics vs. plugging a different mic into a camcorder.
My wife was using this camera with fifteen seconds of tutorial where she never quite got the hang of the ancient Sharp.
At ap. $650 street, I don't see how you can beat this for a 1920x1080p consumer camcorder.