Which Camcorder Should I Buy?

For the past month I have been trying to decide on a new Consumer camcorder and it’s certainly not been easy, in fact I still haven’t decided 100 percent but I thought I’d write about my decision making process for those who may be interested.   So which two camcorders have I narrowed it down to and why?

The Panasonic HDC-SD700 £652.40 at Amazon
I have to admit that I have never really been attracted to any of Panasonics camcorders in the past however having seen the specification of this one I became very interested. So what features does it have? 1920×1080 50p, yes you read that correctly 50p! 28 Mbps AVCHD (which is outside of the 24Mbps specification for AVCHD) and best of all (for me at least) is the manual control of this camera, I have never seen so much manual control on a consumer HD camcorder, EVER! It has Manual Focus, White Balance, Shutter Speed, Iris and Mic Level controls, all controlled by a Lens Ring yes you also read that correctly, a Lens Ring on a consumer camcorder!  It also has Mic and Headphone jacks, this so far is my ultimate camcorder.

So all pretty positive up to this point, what are the negative points? Well for me there are a few. First off it’s the fact that this camera has a cooling fan located behind the LCD screen, Panasonic WHY did you do this? In all the sample footage I have seen from this camera so far I can hear Fan noise. The second problem has got to be the build quality, it looks and feels very cheap and I’m not sure it would survive very well in the bottom of a backpack. The third problem is only having one SDHC memory card slot making seamless relay recording impossible. Fourth problem for me is the accessory shoe, Although I’m really happy it has a standard size cold shoe it uses a stupid bracket that sits on the side of the camcorder, this can easily get lost. And finally perhaps more of a Neutral comment is that the 28Mbps and 50p can be a problem for some editing applications so the benefits may not mean much to some.

So is this the camcorder for me? No it certainly could have been if it didn’t have the cooling fan.

The Sony HDR-CX550VE £973.30 at Amazon
I briefly mentioned this camcorder in my New Sony & Canon Camcorders post back in April, it has only just become available here. And the features of the CX550V are 1920×1080 50i 24Mbps AVCHD, It has Manual Focus, White Balance, Shutter Speed, Iris & Exposure HOWEVER you can’t have manual control of Shutter Speed, Iris & Exposure at the same time which is more than a little disappointing. The manual controls are controlled via the touch screen and with a small thumb dial by the lens. It does have both Mic & Headphone jacks which are something Sony hate to include for reasons only known to them. Though seen as gimmicky by some I’m a big fan of Sony’s Nightshot feature so of course I’m glad to see it’s been included. It also has 64GB of internal solid state storage; personally I’m not too fussed about it. A nice feature though is one called Direct Copy which allows you to copy the internal memory to an external hard drive using a USB cable adaptor. Another feature worth mentioning is the built in GPS on CX550V models, this allows geo-tagging of video.

So now for the cons on this camera, as mentioned above the Manual controls are rather limited, though it does have a combination SDHC/memory stick slot, I would of liked have seen dual slots for seamless relay recording, however I admit it’s not too critical on this camcorder with it having 64GB of built in storage although another annoying thing is that the card slot is at the bottom of the camera! Sony we do use tripods you know! There are currently a lot of people complaining about a “Blue dot” problem with footage taken in the sun, this is purely a lens flare problem which can easily be solved with a lens hood, and this is to be expected on a camera with such a wide angle lens. The reason this is a problem is because Sony didn’t include a lens hood! Another inconvenience of this camera is Sony’s non standard size hot shoe; we don’t want your crap expensive accessories! So you’ll need an adaptor for this.

So is this the camcorder for me? Yes!