Product Reviews

If you've been keeping an eye on the camcorder market, you'll know tape and disks are conceding to models that record high quality video onto memory cards. Panasonic started the ball rolling 18 months ago with the SD1, which used a new format called AVCHD to capture MPEG-4 video clips at high bit rates of up to 17 Mbit/sec to SD cards. Using three CCDs rather than one for improved image quality, the SD1 also connected directly to HD TV sets.

Two generations later, the HDC-SD9 has three 1/6 inch CCDs, each with 520,000 effective pixels, to capture full 1920x1080 HD footage with exceptional clarity. Panasonic's Advanced OIS (Optical Image Stabilisation) helps to iron out the wobbly bits

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when you're using the camera's 10x optical zoom without a tripod, and a built-in 5.1 surround sound mic gives your clips wrap-around sound when played back on a suitable system.

There are plenty of ways the SD9 stands out from the crowd. It takes just 0.6 seconds to start up, so you won't miss many crucial moments, and this is accompanied by a great feature called Pre-Rec, which means the camera constantly records while in standby, keeping the last three seconds when you press Record. So when the unexpected happens, you've got an extra three seconds to hit the button before you missed. Face detection, popular in still cameras, now comes to the SD9 too, tracking up to five faces in a scene to ensure those areas are correctly focused and exposed.

If you want a more film-like look, the SD9's 25P Cinema Mode shoots progressive (movie style) rather than interlaced (video style) frames at the full 1080 line resolution. When you're ready to share the contents of your SDHC cards with others, you can connect the supplied component video cables (or optional HDMI) to an HDTV.

The SD9 shoots fabulous HD movies outdoors, though quality does fall in murky interiors. This is a camera that enables even complete beginners to shoot and save fantastic quality video with ease.