Ingo Raven Blog

Since Christmas I got a new camcorder. After my videos on YouTube and long with a Sony DV camcorder and modified with the Digital Camera Lumix FX-37 was filmed, but was now more and more the desire for a "modern image", ie the 16:9 widescreen format in high definition Full-HD. While the Lumix films immerhinh HD (720p), but is out of the question regarding sound quality.

It's now very easy to collect before you buy a lot of information about each model of all manufacturers. But the amount of information just makes it often hard to keep it the insight. So I quickly realized that each camera its own strengths, but weaknesses in most other areas had. Also found in the network to almost every opinion and the contrary opinion. Anyway, I decided to first for the Panasonic SD 10th This was to have several online vendors for about 350, - €, while for Saturn at least 448, - € cost. Thus, it is clearly one of the most affordable full-HD camcorder.

Panasonic SD 10

The SD 10 is extremely small and light. Her smooth plastic housing, they can tend to seem cheap. She takes in the AVCHD format (. Mts) with a maximum of 17 Mbps on SD card not (included!), And fit on a 4GB card about 25 minutes of video. Like all cameras without tape, hard disk or DVD drive is completely silent. Its plus points include a very good optical image stabilization, a very thorough, intuitive menu navigation with touch screen and a very good audio quality (even manually SPL). The optical zoom is 16x and thus sufficient.

Even in the first test images fall on the same, that the camera barely allows wide-angle shots (42 mm in relation to camera). The image appears on the small screen as sharp, but already this fall on the relatively weak colors. Now you put the SD card into the notebook and looks at the pictures in full resolution, confirmed this impression. The image looks pale and slightly overcast with a pink-gray veil. Manually change some settings - such as white balance or color scheme - the image is yellow or bluish, yet remain murky anyway. In low light the camera will then completely limp and always delivers grayer images.

This impression is confirmed when the picture quality of SD 10 on the very good side of Videoaktiv considered. This was also obvious that the Panasonic SD 10 provides less sharp images than most competing models. Debt has 1/6-Zoll to a small image sensor with 1.47 megapixels gross only (a full HD picture with 1920 x 1080 pixels, about 2 megapixels). For me that was the end for this camera, which therefore went back.

Some further details of the SD 10:

- If you fold the display by 180 degrees around, so that you can even see the films, she hides parts of the operating menu, say you have but one monitor, the camera can not operate from the beginning.

- The charger is the same power supply, you can not charge the battery while filming with power supply.

- Sometimes the picture quality can be improved by increasing the edge enhancement and color intensity in the menu, but the picture looked pink appearance (see below).

- The duration of the batteries is about one hour

Sony HDR CX 105/106

After fairly accurately the test images of different camcorder had studied at Videoaktiv to kristallisiserten out the following alternatives: the more expensive Panasonic SD 200 (from 600, - €) has a good picture, but still less wide angle. Quite well, seemed the more expensive Sony models like the CX 505 or 520, for which one but after all, about 1000, must - shell out €. In relation to the Sony CX 105 high picture quality (except in extremely dark scenes, test images here ) and only costs about as much as the 10th SD Why I had not originally considered in the shortlist, was the fact that they are not recording to SD card, but in its internal memory (8 GB) or Memory Stick. But since you can also read the Menory Stick through normal multi-card reader conveniently in the PC, I decided now for this model.

In the search for the best price I noticed that the same apparently still camera is sold under a different name: Sony HDR CX 106 (instead of 105). The only difference between the otherwise identical models, the CX 106 digital zoom allows a little more, but only in silver instead available in black or red. Supposedly, the CX 106 model for the specialist retail and CX 105 for all other providers. With photo Hamer she was just serving: 359, - € - I got hold of that the last copy in stock.

The Sony CX 106 acts due to the slightly higher weight and more rugged black plastic case (it is silver and black) solid and something nobler. Already on the display the image looks natural yet colorful. Even the sound is excellent. It has only 10-times optical zoom and only an electronic image stabilizer. They also can be operated via touch screen and also plays as AVCHD (. Mts files) to a maximum of 16 Mbps. Unlike the Panasonic can be recorded even with low resolution images as MPEG-2.

Dealing with the camera is easy. Even with the automatic settings, the picture is good, can be set manually with the parameters sufficient for most applications. Overall, however, seems to me the menus on the Panasonic sophisticated. I will keep the Sony because it provides for very little money excellent picture and sound quality, and for most applications is quite sufficient.

For 66, - € I have yet acquired a wide conversion VLC 0630X from Sony, with the camera to work more flexibly.

More info at Amazon:

Related Articles:

• AVCHD video editing (trimming) without re-rendering

Posted on Wednesday, 30 December 2009 at 11:18 am and is filed under Technology . You can use the responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can answer , or trackback from your own site.