Panasonic SDR-S150

Posted by T3 Online on Thu 25 Oct 2007

"Panny" beefs up its three-CCD, er, "cammy"

Even though a hoard of new High-Definition camcorders is poised to hit the high streets, Panasonic's sticking with tried and true tech, revamping its previous three-CCD camcorder the S100 (T3 131, 3/5), with tighter specs. But to paraphrase Alan Partridge, they've NOT just re-badged it, you fool!

This improves on its predecessor in a number of ways. The optical image stabiliser is superb, and it uses SDHC Flash memory cards, an updated version of SD which promises sizes up to 16GB. Well, one day, anyway; for now it comes with a 2GB card, which is good for about 25mins of SuperFine quality video, 50 mins of Fine and 1hour 40 of Long Play.

It sticks with the trusty pistol design, although if you're someone with tiny hands - Tom Cruise, say, or a lady, its girth can make it tricky to grip. It's nowhere near as thin as Sanyo's Xacti.

Mind you, the Xacti is nowhere near as good as this. Three CCDs means fantastic colour quality and this camcorder's performance is second to none in its class. Outdoor footage taken in good light looks brilliantly colourful, although it's less fun in low light.

Getting the footage off the cam is easy. The clumsy-but-simple editing software is largely redundant since we're dealing with MPEG2 - the video file equivalent of Ready Salted. Just change the file extension to .mpg and you can play them in Windows Media Player. After that you can edit, burn, or stick them on YouTube.

Hi-Def camcorders may be widely considered the gold standard, but standard-def camcorders still have an awful lot to offer. For filming people hurting themselves or spectacle-theft, in order to have a laugh on YouTube, you won't do much better than this.