Panasonic TM700

[tom hardwick]

I've just had a jolly good play with Panasonic's 3 CMOS chipped HDC-TM700 camcorder
It records impressive 1080/50p footage to a built in 32GB and uses SDHC cards. It uses the built-in only if the card being used is full or if no card is used.

I like the fact that it's card and not only HDD, that it has a 12x zoom (and not a silly 30x one), it shoots well in the dark and it shoots at 50p - which is more than my posh NX5 can do. It also has a much better side screen than my Sony, but then what doesn't? There's masses of bit-rates to shoot at (all in HD of course) so you can experiment to see which your pc is happiest with. Also card cameras allow you to go on world cruises without worry of filling up the HDD and making the camera constipated.

Shooting 50p means you can stop the timeline anywhere and print a good quality 10" x 8" glossy, the image quality is that good. I'm impressed, and especially so when you consider this is a little palmcorder costing £700 or so. The image stabilisation is unbelievably good yet it allowed me to track hand-held without obvious side-effects.

Downsides? The audio. Panasonic have spent silly money on giving it 5.1 multi-channel mic set-up and for why? Ask any professional - it's hard enough getting acceptable mono audio, let alone stereo or 5.1. Crazy. On top of that the camera runs so hot that that it's fan cooled, and the inbuilt mic overlays all the audio with a miss-mash of rumble that's simply horrible. I attached a small Sony mic to the supplied shoe bracket and this improved things a lot.

Lots of manual controls all activated by on-screen touch menus and the 'focus' ring around the lens, though of course you have to faff about to make this ring operate the focus, exposure, white balance and shutter speeds in turn. And to get slow shutter you've really got to dredge the menu.

In decent light this camera gives outstandingly good pictures and just shows what good value modern hi-def camcorders are - this beast costs half what my TRV900 cost 13 years ago. It also comes with a crude editing package on CD, that enables Blu-ray or DVDs to be made.

tom.

[billyfromConsett]

I got one a couple of months ago - I love it, it's so portable.

The biggest downside in my book is how long the batteries last compared to Sony. I took the standard battery and one with double the capacity to London (I didn't take the charger - doh) and got about two hours of recorded stuff before both batteries ceased to be ...

I repeat - I love it.

[tom hardwick]

You're right about the battery life Billy. Those CMOS chips run pretty hot (all wasted battery power of course) and on top of that the always-running electric fan also gobbles power.

And isn't it strange the way Panasonic name their camcorders? Who'd have thought it made marketing sense to lable their full hi-def £317.70 model an SD60?

I've just found a review on the web of the TM700.

http://www.simplydv.co.uk/reviews/camco ... 0p-review/

The author's conclusions are, ''the TM700 itself is a fabulous camcorder that produces stunningly good images and sound (in optimum situations) for the price''. Makes you doubt published reviews somewhat when comments like that can be made about the audio.

tom.

[tom hardwick]

I see |Amazon have dropped the price to £600 today. Now that's what I call a bargain.

[billyfromConsett]

That's a canny little price drop!

I've tried the 50i and 50p mode, and as yet haven't noticed much difference, though it could be that my workflow and output settings are just stabs in the dark.