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I would have added a mic input to it though then it would have been perfect for the novice film maker. I would buy this product again. This has one of the best picture qualities ever with the three CCD's on it. However, the sound quality of the camera is great. Also, they have great customer service. I love using it and have recorded numerous shots just with the one 60 Gig hard drive on it even though you can add a memory chip to it. The battery last a long time as well.
I was looking forward to a camcorder that will last me for many years (I bought my previous camcorder about 10 years ago, it was a Sony TRV-900 MiniDV if you are curious). I was not impressed with the picture quality, even when shooting at the highest quality setting (17 Mbps) I could see compression artifacts and there was a general lack of sharpness in everything I shot. Of course these popups can be turned off if you don't want to see them.For those who work in 24p this camera records plain 24p streams to the hard drive and SD cards, there is no pulldown applied. This was a surprise to me, one of the main reasons I decided to buy this camera was that it has 3 CCDs, I expected quality was not going to be an issue, but sadly it was.There is a very curious feature in this camera that pops up messages on the viewfinder giving advice or suggesting settings to improve the image.
I tested this camcorder for about a week. Sadly I realized that I would get tired of this one pretty soon due to the many negative aspects I described above. This is possibly the one great feature of this camcorder, as other camcorders record 24p as a 29.97 interlaced stream with pulldown applied, which requires a processing step to restore the original sequence if you want to edit 24p native.In the end I decided to return the camcorder. From a design point of view I did not like the fact that you have to remove the battery to connect it to AC power.
While I can see that it might be useful to get a suggestion when to enable low light mode I've found the "you are panning too fast" message to be annoying, this appears when panning at almost any speed, even very slow speeds if the scene you are shooting is busy enough. I ordered a Canon Vixia HG21 now, we'll see how it goes with it. The camcorder will not connect to a PC to download movies and pictures unless it is on AC power, so I had to plug/unplug the battery a lot while I was doing tests. This was also very noticeable when taking jpeg stills, which to me is unacceptable, even the cheapest digital still cameras can record high quality jpegs.
Just make sure to use the image stabilizer or the video may be a little shaky. The picture quality is fantastic. I researched many HD video cameras and was very happy with this one. I wanted the latest technology and a great picture.
I will not buy another item from Panasonic. The manual is poorly organized and very poorly written. The camera is fine but the manual and included software are junk. Software will not install with XP sp3.
Versatile and easy to use with beautiful sharp video and snapshots which I paired with a Panasonic Viera HDTV and my video life will never be the same. I love this piece of equipment. While it is expensive; I got a great price at Amazon.com compared to going to Best Buy.
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