Panasonic HDC-HS9 Hard Drive Camcorder

item arrived very quickly and they were very good to let me know exactly when it would arrived which it did and was exactly as says in reveiw if not better would defo buy from this seller again without a second thought

A good buy for the average hobbyist or semi-pro. the 3ccd gives excellent quality video with dolby 5.1 sound. A lot of quality for the money as expected from panasonic. Only con is price of extra batteries especially the longer life heavy duty ones and other extras you might want and bundled software is crap though a lot of folks will have appropiate software anyway such as nero etc. pros plenty room on hdd + use of sdhc cards easy to use, compact no big bag to carry round a snip at around £350 on ebay or 450-600 in shops

I bought this camera to replace an older Panasonic NVGS17 which I really loved, but I was fed up of messing about with tapes and it did not record true widescreen.

I am not going to say much about the good things, it is packed full of features, the build quality is excellent, good results so far. I really like panasonic products and I am not dissapointed with this one. The optical image stabilisation is great!

A few minor comments though:
The camera is bigger and heavier than I was expecting, it's pretty much the same width and length as the older tape one, but it is significantly shorter. That said it is not in any way big or heavy! But if you are into small pocket sized gadgets then go for the HDC-SD9 without the hard disk. I actually like the weight it's just enough to help keep the camera steady.

The menu system is navigated with a little nipple style joystick, similar to the older panasonic, but they have moved it to a position behind the LCD. In the older model it was dead easy to navigate, the joystick was just by the record button and you just used the thumb of your right hand. Now you have to use two hands and it's really fiddly. Again not that big a problem becuase once you've set it all up you don't need to use the menu a great deal, and I'm sure I'll get used to it.

This camera only records AVCHD format, for some reason I assumed you would be able to set it down to standard definition and record Mpeg, but you can't. You can convert it to SD using the pc software once you download the films.

The bundled software is cack in my opinion, it's fine for downloading and converting to DVD, if thats all you need then no problem, but the editing is rubbish. I have a reasonable PC a Dual Core Pentium D 2.8 Ghz and 2Gb Ram, and it struggles. I have ordered a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements.

I haven't bothered watching it straight on the TV yet, cos I don't have a HD TV!!

There's loads of settings for face detection and this and that, to be honest I'm not an advanced user, I tried a few things and didn't really notice the difference, I just want to film the kids, holidays and stuff like that. I've got it all set to auto and I'm very happy with the results.

If I could give 4 1/2 I would, mostly because of the crummy software, but I don't think any of the camcorder manufacturers put enough effort into the bundled software.

If you are considering this camera and it meets your needs, go for it, I think you will be pleased.