Panasonic HDC-SD5

Panasonic HDC-SD5

UPDATED REVIEW

After working with the Panasonic SD5 a full ski season, I have to say that I am quite impressed. It is so small and light I have no problem skinning up mountains with it in the backcountry. Here’s what I like most about it:

Video Quality - The raw HD when played on my 720p HDTV is beautiful...sharp, colorful and great with moving subjects (primarily skiers).
External DVD Burner - I bought the camcorder from B&H Photo and at that time it was bundled with the Panasonic VW-BN1 DVD burner which connects to the camcorder and burns the raw HD footage to a normal DVD disc. This is how I archive my raw footage. These DVDs play in my new Blu-Ray player and the HD-DVD players. The footage is stunning!

Size - The camcorder fits into ski jacket pockets with room to spare
Quick startup time - Even my most impatient friends are happy to film

In February, I went to Wyoming to ski the legendary Teton Pass. By the time we hiked the 1,600 feet to the top, the weather had changed and we were in near white out conditions. I still took the camcorder out and filmed a bit, despite the thought that the footage would be useless. When I got home and plugged the camcorder into my HDTV I was amazed at how clear the footage was. Despite the snowfall, distant skiers were in focus and you could see individual flakes of snow falling.

As far as the processing of the AVCHD files, I’ve just used iMovie ’08 and iDVD. Yes, you need a powerful computer and even with that it takes time, however, I do not find that the new HD format was that hard to work with. I edit everything on an early version of the MacBook Pro with 2.16Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2G of RAM. Unfortunately, iMovie/iDVD cannot currently burn in HD format so, as expected, the movies I’ve put together look nothing like the raw footage from the camcorder or what is burned on my archive DVDs. Furthermore, it seems like iMovie is adding a jerkiness or stutter to the footage. Here are some low resolution samples anyway:

East Vail Chutes - Scenery

Indian Peaks Backcountry Skiing

I HIGHLY recommend this camcorder.

ORIGINAL REVIEW

I’m a backcountry skier and hiker and I’ve been looking at getting a hi definition camera for the last couple of months. I spent quite a bit of time scouring the internet looking for cameras that fit my requirements (compact, light, reliable, high altitude use, optical image stabilization, quick startup time, etc.) I’ll be using the camera to film my skiing and backpacking trips primarily. Up till now I used Panasonic’s SDR-S150, which is a standard definition SD card based camcorder and it has served me well, however, I even more resolution so with that I started my search.

When it came to HD camcorders I looked at the following competitors to the SD5:

Canon HG10 - Great video but hard drives fail above 10K feet
Canon HV10/20 - Great video but too big and too heavy
Sony CX7 - Great video but didn’t want to get tied in to proprietary Sony memory cards
Sanyo HD1000 - Doesn’t have optical image stablization, camcorders are useless without OIS

To be honest, I was a bit skeptical after seeing a number of sample videos posted to the web. Some were raw MTS files and some were converted to Quicktime. On my computer some samples looked good but other looked terrible (stuttering motion), granted I had to convert some samples with a program called Voltiac. I bought the camera knowing there was a good chance I’d return it. I received it almost a week ago and this review is based my early footage.

To date, I am quite impressed with the SD5. When playing the footage direct from the camera to my HDTV the picture is amazingly clear and the colors are excellent. The issues I saw in the samples I downloaded from the internet were non-existent...motion is nice an fluid.

SAMPLES - SORRY EXCEEDED MY ISPs BANDWIDTH LIMIT AND PULLED MY SAMPLES

I recently took the camera out to Loveland Pass to take some test footage. Conditions were less than optimal due to high winds, however, it was a good test of the OIS. Once I get settled, you can see that the OIS is very good. Also, in order to get the files sizes down, I converted the 1920 x 1080 raw files to 1280 x 720...file sizes are still quite large. All footage was imported onto my dual core (2.16Ghz) MacBook Pro into iMovie 08 and then exported to Quicktime. While these samples are nice, they don’t do justice to the full resolution files which look so much better on my HDTV versus my laptop.

Movie Sample 1 (232M) -

Movie Sample 2 (117M) -
Note that I am at full optical zoom on this shot

Photo Sample - To be uploaded later

CONCLUSION

Obviously, this is a great little camera and I’d recommend it for someone who needs a small, lightweight SD based camcorder.

Review - Updated 6/9/08