Panasonic SDR-H18

Price: $499.95 - $499.95

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sdr-h18 review05/17/07

Pros:

easy to use, image stabilizer, zoom

Cons:

quality of VERY low light shots

I bought one recently. Now that I've had it for a couple of days, I'm going to try to give an in-depth account of my (so far limited) experience. I hope this helps someone out there.

Handling: It handles fine. It has a manual lens cap, which can be a pain. Not all of the controls are easily reachable with one hand (menu, dvd copy), but these are not the ones you need while shooting, so it matters rather little. It is light and convienent and comfortable.

Picture quality: This was the most important quality to me. The picture quality is very good. No jaggies on my TV once burned to a disk. I really like the lack of digital noise. When I tried the sonys, even the $1000 ones, shadowed areas would show a lot of noise (at least on their LCDs). I hate that. Not a jaggie here unless used with Magicpix - see below. The colors are excellent, just a smear lighter than natural. But unless you put the real subject side by side with the image, I don't think you would be able to tell the difference. Very sharp borders unless the subect is very close and moving quite fast (like if someone runs in front of the camera while you are focused on something else. But, the quality isn't perfect. When standing with my face right next to my standard def TV, I can certainly see imperfections not visible from my couch. Then I looked at a TV show, and on my set if you look that close you see similar problems. If you have a high def TV and enjoy that level of detail, or if you plan to take movies for wide distribution, don't get this camcorder. If you want to take family pictures to embarass your kids with in years to come, its great. In ten years, when everyone had 1080i TV's, it will look inferior. but then, doesn't all old photography and video? By then the new "standard" will be 2160p.

focus: very fast focus in reasonable light (inside with the the lights on or in a room with windows), even with the zoom at 32x. In darker rooms (lights off and blinds closed but with a bit of light coming through the blinds - enough to read by but not comfortably) it takes 1-2 sec to focus. In really dark rooms (MagicPix) it stinks (see below)

Really low light: I tried taking pictures in no light (closet with door closed). No deal, it's just black, even with MagicPix. With magicpix I could use the camera if the door to the closet was open 1 inch. (The room outside the closet had large windows at it was 2PM on a cloudy day, so there was plenty of light but not bright light. The picture with Magic Pix is very grainy except for what you are focusing on. I was able to read a label with magicpix on a box 2 feet away (using zoom)that I could not read by my naked eye. But, heaven forbid you move the camera. Everything becomes a streaky blur until it refocuses - and this can take 5 or more seconds. Anything that you focus on that moves stays in focus, but looks like its moving staccato (like a jerky robot) The only use I could see for Magicpix is to take video of a sleeping baby in a room with only a nightlight. If you or the subject move, forget it.

Moderate low light - like a birthday party indoors with the lights off for lighting candles but lights on in the next room so you can still see a bit:

Very good picture. No need for Magicpix The picture comes out a bit darker -the same as it was in real life. If you could see it with the naked eye, you still see it. If you couldn't, you won't. Seems fair.

Backlit subjects: There is a backlight setting. I tried it with my subject in front of a window. I couldn't tell any difference to be honest.

1ccd vs 3ccd: My understanding is that 3ccd's improve colors much more than resolution. The colors are good. I wouldn't spend $200 more for the h200 with 3ccds to improve the colors.

dvd burning: One touch, but several steps of appropriate timed connections. Still pretty easy. Not a very speedy download - takes about 5 min to download and finalize a 10