Lights camera action! (Panasonic SDR-H20)

Member Name: TheReviewGuys

Product:	Panasonic SDR-H20
Date:	14/04/09 (95 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great video recording

Disadvantages: Poor photos taken

This is the first HDD camcorder i have owned and i was hugely impressed!
The camcorder has a 30gb hard drive which on the very best quility is about 13hrs recording time. If thats not enough time you can always put a SD memory card in for extra space but you have to switch where your recording using the great easy to use menu.
The video playback on the fold out screen is fantastic you also use the screen when taking pictures or recoding videos.
The camcorder can take pictures but these arent that great. There perfectly fine for sending in e-mails due to there small size but not great for printing out.
The camcorder has a optical image stabilizer so when you take a picture and move slightly the image still looks crisp and clear.
The camcorder comes with a cd-rom with software to transfer and copy your videos and pictures with ease to a DVD. Its so easy to use with out any fuss and there is a update online for it to be fully used with windows vista(not yet vista 64).
It also comes with a cable to connect to the tv so you can watch all your movies without having to first burn them to disc.
It comes with a lens cover, battery charger that also can be used to power the camcorder directly without the battery.
I found the battery lasts a extremly long time i used it for about 5hrs and only stopped recording as i got arm ache.
Its not the lightest of camcorders but as ive already said i used it for 5hrs before i got arm ache.
The menu is simple and easy to use to set brightness and contrast etc and it has a option when recording to fade in and out of scenes.
The ease of use is what attacted me to this camcorder as i tried many different ones and this was the type you can just pick up, switch on and push rec and away you go.
When playing back videos or viewing pictures on the camcorder they are shown on the display screen as thumbnail sized images for you to click on to view full screen.
The sound recorded is crisp and clear and theres even a setting to try and block out background noise and to try and record what your pointing at.

Overall i'm really impressed with the simple and easy use of this camcorder and the high quility of recordings and playback.

Summary: Fantastic for videos but poor for taking photos.

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