Cool Cam

The HDC HS20 from Panasonic may seem expensive, but is a safe investment as a next generation camcorder.

My dad is a Sony fan, but this time around he was open to an option of a camcorder from any other company, and he had a clear brief: the camcorder should be able to shoot full high definition video, should have a hard disk, and he should be able to download the data from the camcorder on a Mac or Windows PC without hassle. A little research led me to the HDC HS20, which Panasonic let me try out for two weeks.

It is a light piece, all shiny and well finished. The black body gives it the luxury feel and the Lecia lens adds the magic. This gizmo features a 16x optical zoom, full HD recording, and an 80 GB hard disk. It also supports 32 GB SD/SDHC card. It supports sound capture at 5.1 channel surround, and I must say that the microphone is one of the most sensitive ones I have come across in recent times. The built-in speaker, if you are doing a preview of the movies, is not that great, but the recording is great quality.

The camcorder features an LED Light for shooting in low light, and the manual focus allows you to focus on those hard areas. It supports both H.264 and AVCHD video formats.

I feel disappointed that this camcorder gives only one to two hours of video recording on a fully charged battery. Sadly, the battery and the AC Adapter can’t be used together, so if you are running it on AC power and supply gets disrupted, your recording will stop in the midst of the action.

The camcorder has a 1.47 megapixel sensor giving an affective 1.17 megapixel digital still camera. Still images and the video can be recorded on the same media—SD card or hard drive. It also features a 40x to 100x digital zoom and has a focal length of 2.95mm to 47.2 mm. The 2.7” wide LCD seemed a bit small to me. I love the part where you can randomly access video segments you had shot, and that you can easily select video quality depending on whether you want full HD or HD mode, you can go from 8 to 33 hours of recording. More here.

Sapra is The Big Geek at System3. He also blogs at TheBigGeek.com

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