Panasonic Digital Camcorder
Panasonic produces a variety of digital camcorders in a wide range of price points and sophistication. There is a choice of Panasonic digital camcorder models for the professional videographer as well as for the family guy cultivating video keepsakes. Whatever your need, you can find a Panasonic camcorder to suit you. Here, we’re mostly concerned with camcorders for personal use.
Prices range from about $200 for the bottom of the line, to about $700 for personal models, while professional solid-state camcorder kits can cost many thousands of dollars.
In addition to price, options to consider include portability (lightweight or heavy), convenience and ease of use (especially for the beginner), video quality and resolution, available recording time, and features such as zoom, lighting and aperature choices, custom menu options, headphones, microphone, and so on.
Panasonic SDR-H85
This is a low-to-midrange model standard-definition HDD camcorder, with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of $349. It is lightweight and portable, weighing 8.3 ounces with battery.
This model gets very favorable reviews from CNet and PC World. The video quality is considered merely okay, but the convenience and the excellent zoom are both standouts. The manual controls are very good. CNet praises it as being “like having a small telescope.” All reviews seem to pull out the optical image stabilization for special mention. There is no touch screen and so that may feel old-fashioned.
The Panasonic SDR-H85 has an 80GB hard drive and comes with SD, SDHC, and SDXC cards. Resolution is 800k pixels. Video/photo resolution is 704×480/640×480.
Panasonic PV GS80
The editors at CNet don’t love this little guy, but users rave about it. Every product review site on the Internet seems to overflow with praise for the Panasonic PV GS80. Price range is around $480-500.
This camcorder features Panasonic’s Optical Image Stabilizer, which helps minimize the shaky look that can mar the quality of hand-held video. The image quality is very good, and videos are clear. The zoom is not as magnificent as the SDR-H85, but at 32x optical zoom, you’ll be in the middle of the action even from a distance. There’s very low distortion on the zoom, so when you’re ready for your close-up the picture will be clear and gorgeous.
This little camcorder has widescreen 2.7-inch LCD screen with High-Picture-Quality Wide Mode. If you view your camcorder movie on a widescreen television, you’ll immediately see the results are dramatic and striking.
The camcorder also has a 1.7-second Quick Start mode that lets you jump in and shoot a video in an instant. Baby doing something adorable? Pet cracking you up? Capture the moment because you can power up in just 1.7 seconds by opening the LCD screen.