I am loving it!, December 7, 2007

This one is a winner. I havent put it to too much test because I am still waiting for my 32GB P2 cards. I had done a bit of testing with the FS-100 HD and had to return it double fast. If you want to fully enjoy the use of this camera, its best to go with the P2 cards, they are light-weight and dont have any moving parts. The FS-100s are clumsy, although a great idea, you could easily pull the firewire cord without realising it and waste several hours of valuable recording in the process.

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FAULTY COMPONENTS FAIL – ONLY A ONE YEAR WARRANTY, August 31, 2010

Smaller components, such as the headphone jack, IEEE1394 jack, etc will fail on you and repairs will cost you hundreds of dollars. I purchased one of these cameras in august of 2009 only to have both the headphone jack and IEEE 1394 port fail – only days out of the one-year warranty expiration period.

Do NOT buy this camera because for what your paying (an extremely expensive ,000+ price tag) you would expect a much more quality product. **These various ports and jacks failing are a known issue with these cameras. See the panasonic forums and other websites**

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Professional Image Quality in an Amateur Camera Body, June 17, 2009

By 

Stephen Stough – See all my reviews

  

As the retired chief technology officer for a Fortune 100 company that developed their own digital cine camera, my fundamental interest was in image quality. This 3-CCD, 1440 x 1080i anamorphic 16:9 format camera produces outstanding image quality — closer to the theoretical limits of performance of 1/4 inch sensors than anything in its price range.

The complex optics (zoom with a telecentric focal length converter ahead of the prism assembly) should be expected to reduce the available contrast ratio because it has so many glass surfaces. Without the sophisticated equipment to measure MTF (modulation transfer function) at home, I measured effective resolution instead, which was 576 lp/pw vs. the theoretical limit of 719 lp/pw in the horizontal axis. This is an indication that all the glass surfaces are, indeed, causing a significant loss of contrast ratio.

Even so, the camera performs very well in almost all respects. Panchromatic dynamic range excedes…

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spoiled hmc150 user, February 2, 2009

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Olin R. Blankenship (ny) – See all my reviews

  

i am one of those few people who own both hmc70 and hmc150.while my hmc150 is top notch product,i cant criticize my hmc70 if i look at the fact that it cost 1/3 of what hmc150 did to me.

hmc70 is consumer camera fitted into big body,but……..this consumer camera will put lots of other professional camera to shame.

if u are looking for hd quality under two grand look no further.i bought this camera when it was on sale 3 weeks ago.price went up since then.

pros: great picture(under good light though),sound is good even with in built mic,very reasonably priced for 3ccd ,2 cold shoe,volume indicator ,decent view finder,great professional look for this price,and above all no more tape(sdhc recording is really a revolution in professional video business)

1.this camera has 3ccd(1/4) which you cant find in other canera at this price range(i always thought panasonic give more value to your money than sony,jvc let alone canon -canon dont have technology to make ccd so…

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Excellent Video quality But Camera is Large, April 15, 2009

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R. hall (Savannah, GA) – See all my reviews

  

OK, I am not a professional videographer, but I know what looks good on a nice television or screen. I tried the smaller HD camcorders (Canon HF 10, and Sony HDR-SR11), and they have excellent video quality if you do not move the camera. I mean don’t follow your kids around the yard or try to video a bird in flight or pretty much anything moving. What happens is that you get a kind of ghosting in the video, so the High Def picture I was shooting for looked very pixellated and low quality. I decided to try a prosumer type video camera, and this one was the least expensive HD available at the time. Once it arrived at my house I used it to video several different scenes that gave me difficulty with the hand-helds. The quality of the video was astounding. I could get the same quality during moving shots that I could get with the static shots using the hand-helds. Great I thought I solved the problem of pixellated video in HD. However, there was one small problem. This Camera is…

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Good stuff, April 10, 2007

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A. Laferriere “Casual Gamer” – See all my reviews

  

Pricy, but I have a club backing the money. Great for an up and coming Director.

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HMC40 review, September 29, 2010

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H. Bunn (AL-USA) – See all my reviews

  

Great camera with Great pictures at a great price! Tripod is a little cheesy as it is light weight but wobbly motion – plastic head and can pop off due to the plastic bolt. Need a class 10 SDHC card too. I use it mainly for videoing family and high school band performances.

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It is what it is, November 1, 2006

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W. Roland “Acoustics/AV Consultant” (Southest USA) – See all my reviews

  

Yes, technically this is a HiDef camcorder. No, its video output is not on par with traditional HDV camcorders such as those from Sony, Canon, etc. But, it is important to understand that this is a hybrid device with a unique feature set and good performance with a cost point that is about half of what a low-end HDV camcorder would cost. The video quality (in HD mode) is superior to regular DV camcorders and the stills are better than my 5-year old Sony 4MP camera. If I’m going to shoot critical production video or capture stills for color-separated print work, I going to use the proper tools. But, I’m not going to haul pro gear to a high school soccer game or a family BBQ. I can throw this thing into my pocket, shoot for hours and have fun doing it. For me, the unique packaging, versatile operation and efficient battery life means I will shoot more memories. Sometimes, that’s more important than the compression scheme or low-light performance. Highly recommended.

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Best camera for the price, but beware of some problems, November 12, 2006

This is the best HD camera for the price. It’s the lightest HD camera of any kind. The quality is equivalent to professional SD cameras from 10 years ago if you’re careful. You can get more resolution, more features, and more weight, for more money. It depends on how much you want to spend and how much excercise you want.

Now the bad news. You have to be careful to get the best quality from it. It has to be tripod mounted. You must keep ISO at 50 or 100. Keep the shutter speed below 1/100 or it produces very grainy images. Lower shutter speed seems to enable noise reduction.

It experiences blooming when shooting bright objects or the Sun. Don’t bother using the still picture support. Get a digital SLR for still pictures.

The lens is cockeyed. You have to angle your tripod down to shoot level and you can’t use the docking station for shooting. It won’t stand up on its own without a tripod because it’s top heavy.

The tripod mount…

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The best camera in the world is useless if you don’t have it with you…, December 31, 2006

By 

Steven W. Rose (Haliimaile, HI United States) – See all my reviews

  

The HD1 is a wonderful, amazing camera. And it is small enough that you can always have it with you — I’ve carried mine for months in my front pants pocket in its protective case, and been able to capture family and work stills and video that would otherwise have been lost. Even if the quality were not up to par, I would have something instead of nothing. But the quality is great! I’ll expand on the quality below.

This camera is genuinely high definition, more than three times the resolution of NTSC. This is best shown by comparing a DV image captured with firewire (no NTSC modulation artifacts) on a computer monitor, to the HD1 image transferred from its SD card. Notice that this comparison should favor the DV — but instead, it makes the increased resolution of the HD1 clear.

HD televisons and monitors are already commonplace, and video captured at less than HD quality will not be as highly valued (like 8mm, good for historical content)…

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