( 9 reviews )
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Posted: 04-02-2009
I bought this camera when I was oversea vacation. It's great camera for the amount of money. So, I edited my footage time line video clips by using Sony Vegas Pro to make a Blu-ray movie. It's unreal, it's sharp, but the only thing that got me is: I had to import the video clip through its own software that came with the camera and then save them as MPEG2 file before I can transfer to the Vegas time line. If anyone has better idea, please let me know. Thank you Thomas B.
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Posted: 07-03-2008
I love this camera. It's tiny, but does not feel like a toy. The auto-focus is very good and fast enough for my needs. The 12x optical zoom with Optical Image Stabilization is great. The image quality is amazing (though I should say I jumped a number of technologies as my previous video camera was S-VHS). The lack of broad AVC-HD support did cause me some pain (mostly financial) as to solve it I switched from Adobe Premiere to Sony Vegas (for a number of reasons including the lack of AVC-HD support in Premiere). So far I haven't been successful in being able to view AVC-HD videos in any Media Player so I have to load Vegas just to view the raw video on my PC. I also purchased a much larger 16Gb SDHC card since the included 4Gb card was just too small for my needs, and after using the camera for a while I plan to buy a second battery (I get about 80 minutes out of the battery). Speaking of the battery, the charger has a strange quirk in that you can't charge the battery at the same time you are powering the camera. This seems weird to me, and I have forgotten to unplug the cable from the charger once or twice and not ended up with a charged battery (it doesn't matter if the camera is actually connected, or on, there is apparently a switch that is hit when you plug in the camera's power cable so it must be unplugged in order to charge the battery). Also, the camera itself will not charge a battery in the camera, so you can either power the camera or charge a battery, never both. The microphones (all 5 of them) on the camera work great when recording video, as long as the action is fairly close. This isn't a complaint as I would have been shocked if the camera did well at recording far away (it's not magic) and thankfully it does have an external microphone jack (which I admit that I have yet to use as I usually digitally record the audio on-site with my Wolverine or Nomad Jukebox 3). For family videos it is does great at capturing very reasonable audio. You should know that the external backup hard drive is big. The hard drive is nearly as long and as wide as the largest dimensions of the camera itself (not as thick in the third dimension) and while the camera is heavier, the hard drive gives it a good run. The hard drive does work, and it works well, but my feeling is that if they are going to force you to buy this as part of the package, it should at least have been a large (100Gb or larger) hard drive (especially since the retail price for 40Gb drives are well under $40). It should be optional or an accessory. I'll stick with my Wolverine for this as well. My biggest complaint is that the camera constantly resets the image numbering. All of the other digital cameras I have owned keep a running count of videos or still images taken and numbers the files accordingly until I specifically reset them (for example, my Sony F-828 is currently generating images like DSC08428.jpg, which means that I've taken 8,428 photos with that camera since I last reset it). Having the file numbers constantly starting from 0 on the media means that I have to renumber them all before I copy or take a chance on accidentally overwriting a previous file. Another complaint about the camera is that it refuses to record more than about an hour at a time in "normal" quality. I'm guessing that this is a file size issue and when it comes close it starts blinking the display and then just stops recording. How dumb is this? I understand that the file system on the card might have limitations, but how hard would it have been to simply open another file and keep recording until the media was full (hopefully without a video skip between the files)? If there is an option for this I haven't found it yet. This limitation caused me to miss a few minutes of video in the middle of a performance I was recording, so I was very annoyed. Now that I know about the limitation I can likely work around it, but why should I have to? The camera takes still pictures that look reasonable, but many of them have a strange "cut-out" quality to them (like the foreground and the background are disconnected). I'm not sure whether this is a haloing affect or something else, but I didn't buy the camera for stills and for the occasional still it's good enough. It will definitely not replace my F-828 for still photos. I can't comment on the software that comes with the camera as I don't use it. I did download the "AVC-HD to DVCPRO Transcoder" from the Panasonic web site (they didn't make the software easy to find) from https://eww.pavc.panasonic.co.jp/pro-av/support/desk/e/download.htm. Note that you'll have to go through some significant annoyance because they must send you an e-mail with a custom password (which didn't work for me the first time but did the second). Summary: In general I think this is a great camera for HD video in a very small package with the features I needed. There are a few quirks and I have a few other minor complaints, but they are, so far, all easily worked around. All-in-all I am very happy with this camera and now that I know about the file size limitation it's not too hard to work around it. Support for the AVC-HD encoding is sparse but growing quickly.
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Posted: 04-27-2008
The AG-HSC1U is a VERY small camcorder, for my particular use the size and solid-state recording was a big part of the choice. Once in use the camcorder impressed with beautiful pictures, however for interviews one need to mount a bracket to hold the microphone, I got one with 2 shoe mounts for a video light to pop the faces and also a microphone, it would be nice to have a headphone jack, but there is no such thing, instead there is a recording level indicator on the screen, I was a bit apprehensive about this starting out, but in practical everyday use this works well. This camcorder is a "Pro" version of the older Panasonic SD1 camera, the colors have been tweaked to match the look of other professional cameras, this works well and I find the shots to play nicely with much more expensive panasonic pro cameras. Unlike most serious camcorders this camera is mostly menu driven, there is no exposure-compensation. however there is a small joystick which makes it easy to adjust the lighting. the most common used adjustments are accessed by sliding the mode slider to Manual and then pressing the joystick once, this will let you toggle through the settings one at a time, you can select a option by moving the cursor sideways - once selected you can move sideways to increase or decrease a setting such as aperture, gain, or shutter speed, press downwards to exit a option. in practical use this works easy and are simple to figure out, I use the aperture all the time and it is the first option when I turn on manual because it was used last. The camera have zebra stripes so it is easy to judge exposure. The camera could possible have a bit more dynamic range, but I have not found it being a problem, I typically shoot outdoors interviews with a graduated ND filter to control the sky and use a reflector to pop some light in the top of the face which also is in the ND filter, the result look great and do not look like something from a cheap camcorder. The lens is longer than the other SD cameras with 12x zoom, which really is about as long as you can hold still any way, I use this camera mostly on monopod or handheld in the cockpit of airplanes. The lens is sharp and with no vignetting. The AVCHD files edits well with Vegas Pro 8, I have not tried the economy compression and only use the best quality setting which looks beautiful on the screen. A added bonus is the 40gig portable harddrive which ships with this camera model, the drive is battery powered and I have successfully dumped 5 days worth of cards to the drive with no recharge required. Generally the camera performs well and overall I am very pleased with this purchase, it plays well with other cameras and I am about to pick up a second for the company. In my personal opinion this camera is highly recommended as long as you realize that have have some limitations it will serve you well and deliver images you can use for production. Ultimately, only you can determine if this camera will "do the trick" for you, based on your needs and the performance vs price of the camera, you can find larger cameras with more features at the same price, but they are pretty darn hard to stuff in the pocket in the cockpit.
