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Panasonic HDC-SD9 AVCHD 3CCD Flash Memory High Definition Camcorder with 10x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom |
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| Good video. Go for it |
I 've read a lot of reviews before purchasing this camcorder. Excellent video in sun light, even overall it 's a little bit yellowish to my taste. Amazon is best price, and they refund me the difference when the price went lower in within 30 days after purchase.
Low light is OK. and I found it better than the JVC HD camcorder that my brother has. Extremely low light is not acceptable.
I do not have time to test the 5.1 audio on my NAD receiver.
Insert the SD card in to a playstation 3 SD slot and there you go. Or copy the files to a DVD and watch it thru the PS3 bluray drive. HD resolution!
Go for it! Small size and picture quality will make you happy. |
| Sep 22, 2008 |
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| Amazingly small and smart |
| The camera is very impressive, intuitive and small. The quality of the picture is excellent. Playback is easy. It was good choice. |
| Sep 17, 2008 |
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| Very Good Camera |
I liked it very much.
i bought it to capture moments of my new born baby, and its fantastic, very light, easy to handle, good looking, good quality pictures. |
| Sep 17, 2008 |
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| Best camera in this price range |
I'll start by saying that I did what seemed like endless research and tried out every camera in this range before ultimately deciding on this one. What I hope to do with this review is share my experiences and hopefully provide the kind of information I wanted to see when I was doing research.
Now, about the specifics of this camera. It's a 3CCD model, which was one of the major selling points for me. I do a lot of outdoor shooting of high action sports (rock climbing), and this camera surprised me with it's quality and it's ability to capture colors so accurately. The 3CCD design also means that if you're going to be doing some blue/green screen effects that you'll get a better key. It's build quality is very solid; and by that I mean it doesn't seem flimsy at an point. The the automatic lens cover is wonderful. It has 4 recording quality modes, and a 24p cinema mode. I use the HA1920 mode, which records 1920x1080i60 resolution at 16Mbps AVCHD and works out to 2 hours 8 minutes on a 16GB SDHC card. While I don't use the 24p mode shooting action sports outdoors, I have tried it indoors and it really does give a cinema-like feel to the video; it's a nice feature to have. I'm using this card Transcend 16GB SDHC CARD (SD 2.0 SPD CLASS 6) with Co Card Reader, and the included card reader tends to transfer files slightly faster than the USB connection on the camera does; plus-it allows you to charge the battery while you're importing the video. The optical image stabilizer on this camera is nothing short of amazing. It records consistent jitter-free footage, even while hanging from a rock face 30 meters above the ground. The zoom is also VERY smooth, and there is absolutely no zoom motor noise picked up by the microphone. The intelligent shooting guide, and the other assist features are great.
Pros:
-Amazing quality video
-Superior optical stabilization
-Intelligent shooting guide
-Battery life is very good, often better than the manual quotes
-Smooth zoom/zoom noise not picked up by microphone
-Uses SDHC cards, which are cheap enough to keep a few on hand
-Editing is easy on OS X. iMovie imports the video into it's amazing user interface, and the Final Cut products let you browse and select which video to import using the Log and Transfer window (Shift+Command+8). I prefer importing the footage into the Apple Intermediate Codec using Final Cut, then importing to iMovie if I want to browse it quickly.
Cons:
-Extra batteries are expensive.
-You can't use the camera on AC power and charge the battery at the same time.
-The thumbstick is awkwardly positioned, but you get used to it. It's kind of like playing tetris with the controller sideways.
-AVCHD can take a while to import if you have a slower machine(I don't but I can see how others might become frustrated).
-Manual focus is essentially impossible to use effectively.
Other Thoughts:
This camera has 3 few user-assist features that I found helpful.
1) Zebra stripe mode: This will put zebra stripes on the screen to help you identify areas of the video with poor exposure.
2) Wire frames: These can be set to various sizes, and they help you to center your shots.
3) Intelligent Shooting Guide: With this active, the camera will warn you, on screen, if you have any serious errors going on such as panning too fast, incorrect contrast settings, low light mode, etc. It even pops up the on screen menu, and skips to the screen where the option it recommends is located. For example, I was shooting outdoors and I walked into a bike tunnel, the camera recommended I activate low light mode and it skipped to the proper menu, so all I had to do was press a button to confirm. You can also ignore it's advice and it won't keep nagging you. A very helpful feature, useful for both novices and advanced users.
One last thing to consider, when you convert the raw AVCHD footage to Apple Intermediate Codec or ProRes 422 the resulting files are going to be massive. Make sure you have an external hard drive to store this stuff on. As far as transcoding the raw AVCHD to AIC or ProRes422... some may say that you will lose quality, etc. This is nonsense, AIC and ProRes422 were created for this very purpose--to make editing high res, high bitrate video more feasible on modern machines. They were designed to preserve quality, and ProRes422 is even touted as being visually lossless. If you wanted to edit raw AVCHD you would need a 8-core machine.
Summary:
While I did list a few cons, they pros FAR outweigh them, even to the point where I can forget about the cons altogether. For the features and the quality this camera provides, I think it is an excellent buy. |
| Sep 10, 2008 |
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| Simply Amazing, But AVCHD Is Still Foreign To Most PCs |
The camera is a technical marvel. I've been wanting an HD camera ever since they came out. The HDC-SD9 has not dissapointed me. Five years ago you'd have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get video this good. Now the downside.
The files are kept in a complex file structure on the memory drive. I wasn't able to copy the MTS files from the /STREAM folder and play them on my T61 Thinkpad. I tried downloading various CODECs and stuff, but wasn't succesfull. I finally loaded the HD Writer software from Panasonic and that worked. But when I exported to MPEG the result was lousy.
I haven't tried editing software with it yet, but I know this much. It will be another two to three years before this format plays in all the media players. But I can't see this format failing so I'll be glad I have my kids in HD later on.
Bottom line is that the technology and price are right, but file-format ease of use is still a few years away. You'll love making videos, but you'll hate post-production. |
| Aug 25, 2008 |
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