Product Reviews

Many of Panasonic's HD camcorders have only an SDHC memory card slot for storage, but the HDC-HS9 adds a hard disk into the mix. Its 60GB capacity will store around eight hours of HD video even at the highest quality setting of 17Mbit/s. Add a 16GB SDHC card for under £50 inc VAT and you've got over 10 hours of storage. This should be enough for holidays or weddings, and the memory card can be used for copying and transferring data.

You'll need a big battery to take advantage of all that storage, and the HDC-HS9 allows this thanks to an external cavity for the battery on the rear. The supplied 1,320mAh battery provides a continuous recording time of one hour and 42 minutes, but you can fit batteries up to 5,800mAh, which protrude from the back.

Fitting a large battery isn't a big issue as there's no viewfinder to obstruct. Instead, there's a 2.7in LCD screen that displays an impressive level of detail, thanks to its 300,000 pixels. Enthusiasts may bemoan the lack of a viewfinder, but it's not hard to see that the HDC-HS9 is aimed at novices. There's

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no input for a microphone, for example, so you're stuck using audio from the built-in 5.1 surround-sound microphone. The lack of an accessory shoe means you can't add a video light directly to the camcorder.

Instead Panasonic has focused on ease-of-use features for casual users. Face detection, now widely available on stills cameras, makes its camcorder debut here. Faces are tracked by the camcorder, while focus and exposure are adjusted to suit them. It works well, although the rest of the shot often suffers from over- or under-exposure because of it. Thankfully a dedicated button is provided to disable this feature.

Panasonic continues to use three smaller CCD sensors to generate HD video, rather than a single large CMOS sensor as used by both Sony and Canon. Despite this, the HDC-HS9 can produce 1,920x1,080 video, in either interlaced or progressive modes. In bright conditions the three CCDs provide a crisp image with great colour accuracy. However, their small 1/6in size means they suffer in dim light from a lack of colour and plenty of picture noise. Canon's HG10 (What's New, Shopper 240) produces good video quality in a wider variety of conditions, though the two camcorders are about equal in well-lit surroundings.

The HDC-HS9 is compact, stylish and well-designed, and ideal for those who just want to point and shoot. Camcorders tend to be expensive just after they're released, though, and this is no exception. Canon's HG10, despite its smaller hard disk and miniSD-only card slot, is currently a better deal at £580 including VAT from www.empiredirect.co.uk.