[steveh07]

Hi all,
I now own an sd10,a pc and a ps3.
Took the sd10 for a test film yesterday (using out the box settings) and using the software bundled with the cam (hd writer1.5) burnt the footage onto a disc and tried watching it on the ps3..looks great IMO but (I am a complete newbie at this!) the PS3/sony tv played it at 1080i? not 1080p.
So I wanted ask anyone in the know...

1) Anyone also purchased this cam? and what settings do they find the best so far?

2) How using the bundled software can I make 1080 p discs (do I need a blu ray burner) and can the film footage actually be blu ray quality anyway?

Kind regards
steve

[Pinky Floyd]

Argos are selling these for £299 at the moment, anyone who has one I'd love to know your thoughts!

Link

[Pinky Floyd]

I went ahead and bought this and thought I'd post some thoughts on it.

Cosmetics:
The camera is very nice to look at and hold, very small. Opening the viewfinder makes the battery visible which is odd, though hardly a deal breaker. It's a manual lens cover which looks pretty sturdy and shouldn't break. All the buttons are within easy reach and the touch screen menu system is very easy to use, I'm not sure why they include a stylus, but then I am used to my iPhone. When folk see it for the first time they go 'Wow', which kind of says it all. The camera is black

Ease of use:
Intelligent Auto (IA)? Can be used by a blind, deaf and stupid monkey, though his entertainment mileage from the product may vary. Fully manual is there if you want it though, so far I haven't needed it but it's nice to know it's there. Point and shoot is the order of the day.

Picture Quality:

I've shot in the highest quality available both outside in bright light, early morning, late evening, while walking and in the living room in low light at night when only one or two normal lamps are on.

Image quality outside in daylight is excellent, eliciting a 'wow' from friends who were round last evening and viewed it on my 40" philips plasma. Outside early morning and late evening shots are also very good, with a little grain introduced but no other noise to speak of.

Inside the house at night with normal lamps on the quality reduces from excellent to 'good'. When I say that I mean the picture is perfectly watchable and of a fairly good quality. Noise is only present in the form of some grain but both myself and my wife were more than happy with the images the camcorder took inside the house. In fact, after reading in a few places how poor this camcorder is in low light, I'm actually pleasantly surprised. No skipping frames, no artifacting of any kind, it's just a bit more grain and not as sharp.

Camcorder seems to track movement well, if you pan really fast you can get a warning message but I had to pan deliberately fast to get that to happen.

The Advanced OIS works quite well, smoothing out some shots I took while walking quite fast, I was pleased. Also the optical zoom is superb and again the OIS really helps here (as does a half steady hand!).

Ease of playback/burning/editing:
I have a quad core with 4gb of ram and a 512mb 8800 GT running vista 64 bit. I installed HD Writer AE 1.5 and it seems to work well. Playback is smooth and I burned an AVHCD DVD which played fine on my PS3 and the quality was indistinguishable from playing directly through the PS3 via the SD card (which is a great feature for those of use with a PS3 that has card inputs). I haven't tried editing or converting footage to SD for DVD.

I can stream footage over the wireless network using PS3 Media Server but at the highest quality it pauses every few seconds, which is to be expected giving the huge amounts of data being spat across my wi-fi network. Image quality remains as high as other display methods.

Conclusion:
For our first camcorder I think it's smashing for the price (£300). I think this will complement my Sony A200 DSLR very nicely in getting pictures and video of our new daughter as she grows up.

Hope you like my appraisal of the camcorder, if I come across anything poor that happens to change my current frame of mind, I'll update the thread

[430 Scuderia]

Hi all. I have been looking around at buying camcorder and the panasonic sd-10 seems a strong contender. The main concern I have with buying one is some people say that it can be jerky when panning or zooming fast. I am into sports photography so panning/zooming is a common technique I use. At the moment we have a old JVC camcorder so im thinking of upgrading to HD quality so I can film sports events.
Any views on the panning/zooming smoothness of the SD-10 would be much appreciated.
Also thanks Pinky Floyd for writing that review I found it very interesting/useful. Also you got a great deal, I see on argos its now gone from £299 to £399!! The cheapest I can now find it for is £313 on amazon.
Thanks 430 Scuderia

[Achy]

Panasonic are offering a £50 cashback or free SDHC card for purchase up to 31st Dec. (If you have an instore demo of it)

So John Lewis are offering it for £350 plus £50 cashback... So yours for £300

Products - Camcorders - Overview - Panasonic Camcorder with £50 cashback or 32GB SD Card - UK & Ireland

[DaiB]

I've had my SD10 for about 2 months now and have used it on a recent long USA holiday. I can hardly find fault with it; it's brilliant. The review criticisms about noise in low-light appear to be over negative. I've used it indoors and out in poor light and it does surprisingly well. I've not come across any jerkiness when panning. I use the next to top picture quality setting having found no need to use the top setting of the four quality modes. A warning message comes up if you do pan too fast to give you an idea of limits. The camcorder's auto settings work extremely well; it really is point and shoot and includes face recognition. The LCD screen menus are well designed and structured. I either play the camcorder using the HDMI lead into my Sony 40W5810 HD TV or DLNA network to it using free PS3MS software downloaded onto my PC. Either way the pictures are brilliant with no technical issues. I've bought an extra battery (the next capacity up is not cheap but is the same physical size as the one supplied with the camera). You do need to think through where you will store the large MPEG4 files e.g. large PC hard drive with backup as you will want to clear the expensive SDHC cards

[430 Scuderia]

Thanks everyone for your comments and help its been really useful. I have been looking around at more prices and im happy to say that I can beat John Lewis's price of £350 by going to Dixons who are selling it for £313.10 then minus the £50 cashback =£263.10
I will have to buy an Sd card but its still cheaper!!

[eireann10]

Originally Posted by 430 Scuderia

Thanks everyone for your comments and help its been really useful. I have been looking around at more prices and im happy to say that I can beat John Lewis's price of £350 by going to Dixons who are selling it for £313.10 then minus the £50 cashback =£263.10
I will have to buy an Sd card but its still cheaper!!

i have also decided to buy this camcorder, cant think if theres a Dixons near me - at this price i really hope so

best i could get was Amazon at £313

it has to be purchased instore for cashback option, isnt that right?

[martyboge]

Originally Posted by 430 Scuderia

Thanks everyone for your comments and help its been really useful. I have been looking around at more prices and im happy to say that I can beat John Lewis's price of £350 by going to Dixons who are selling it for £313.10 then minus the £50 cashback =£263.10
I will have to buy an Sd card but its still cheaper!!

Was hoping to do the same but Dixons is online only now, so you wont be able to get your instore demonstration to qualify for the cashback! Currys is the same company and on the participating dealer list, but selling at £379.99!!! John Lewis arent on the list either

[grazeanhammer]

The cashback offer is valid at John Lewis:

"Purchase in-store from branches of Currys and John Lewis PLC, or search here for your local participating independent Panasonic dealer"

http://www.panasonic.co.uk/html/en_GB/Products/Camcorders/Overview/Panasonic+Camcorder+with+%C2%A350+cashback+or+32GB +SD+Card/Panasonic+Camcorder+with+freesdcard/2194145/index.html#anker_2194147

[RobbySpurs]

Does anyone know how much the 32GB memory card is? Suspect more than £50 then isn't the memory card the best value option on this deal? About to go over to John Lewis to get this!

And do you have to go through with a demonstration...?

[neo83]

Originally Posted by RobbySpurs

Does anyone know how much the 32GB memory card is? Suspect more than £50 then isn't the memory card the best value option on this deal? About to go over to John Lewis to get this!

And do you have to go through with a demonstration...?

Hey RobbySpurs

I went into a Panasonic store nearby to checkout the SD-10 and apparently Panasonic are giving away the 32GB class 4 SD card and seems to be anywhere between £110 - £140. Seems like a very nice offer, but the only thing is that the camcorder price is £359 . If only Panasonic included all retailers for the offer like Sony do.

What do you guys think about the Sony HDR-CX105E when compared to SD-10? The image sensor size of sony (1/5") is bigger than the SD-10 (1/6") with effective pixels (1.4M) more than SD-10 (1.17M) (Not sure how big a difference it is), although Sony has 10x optical zoom compared to SD-10s 16x.

This is my first camcorder, so would appreciate any sugestions.

Thanks

[RobbySpurs]

Cheers. Actually went out today and got the SD10 - found out that Currys and John Lewis are in on the deal. £349 from John Lewis, less the £50 cash back or with the 32gb memory card. Quite happy with that as the cheapest I found it was Amazon at 313.00. And I prefer buying at a store. Think that is quite a good deal.

[grazeanhammer]

Yeah, i'm definetly thinking about following you on the john lewis purchase.

Problem is at the mo i keep considering the sd20 and tm10.

The sd20 mainly because it looks better imo, i know its a little bigger but the spec seems exactly the same other than this!

The tm10 well just considering having the internal hard drive as a back up in the...'oh $**t i forgot the card'....eventuality. i know 'more moving parts' and all that but is that something to really worry about.

Choices, choices... any comments would be much appreciated

[RobbySpurs]

Had a look at the TM 10 aswell as it obviously has that use straight out of the box facility. Trouble was it was about £100 more in John Lewis so that kinda swung it! Now just waiting for the memory cards that I have ordered to arrive!

Let us know what you decide to do!

[galvin2]

Previous advice and comment very helpful, thanks. I too am considering buying this Model but:-

The HDMI output is 1080 Interlace whereas my Pana. Plasma TV is HDMI Progressive. Page 87 of the Camcorder Manual, as I read it, says the picture will run at 576p on the TV which negates the purchase of an HDMI Camcorder unless I can get the TV (Model TH-42PZ70BA ) to run recordings off the SDHC card plugged in a slot (I'm not hopeful as it seems this is only for stills).



Secondly, if recording @ max. resolution ("HA" 17Mbps), is it true that this will only be succesful if a Class 10 SDHC card ("up to 22Mbps") is used. They give away a Class 4 card (10Mbps) which appears to only support the third best resolution. Or have I missed something?

Galvin2.

[DaiB]

Galvin, I've tried to understand all the specs about SDHC card speed and have given up. The Pana manual for the SD10 says Cat 4 and above i.e. for successive writes is OK for any quality setting so I think that's all you need. I've searched the web for more info on the subject of speed. The card suppliers sites are useless and so are the ones relating to the standard itself. I've been in electronics for 40 years now and have never come across such a mess with specifications with the marketing people just quoting any number that looks good. Just go for Cat 4 or more

[d a v e y]

Has anyone actually received their cashback or SD card from Panasonic? I sent off my application and John Lewis in-store receipt on 17 December and I'm still waiting for the £50 cheque. Recorded message on the helpline says there is a backlog on some offers but doesn't mention the £50/SD card offer.