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Panasonic Pro AG-HMC150 3CCD AVCHD 24fps Camcorder
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(4.5 out of 5)
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Most Helpful First | Newest First | + Share23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
WOW :-)
(5 out of 5) by Bob Mckelvy on Nov 16, 2008 (Rockport, TX USA)I received my 150 a little over a week ago. Bought it because I wanted to move up to HD and get out of the tape business. It did not come with an SDHC card. Bought an 8 GB to carry me over until my 16 GB cards arrive via Amazon. I am still on the learning curve on it. Especially liked the large comfortable color view eye piece. I was also amazed by the clarity of the video play back on my 48" LCD screen. Used the three cable output first, that came with the camera( Video, Lt. Rt. Audio )
Very clear video, much clearer than my trusty old Canon GL-2 It does not come with an HDMI cable. Bought one locally and tried it. Plugged one end into the HDMI out port on the camera and the other end into the HDMI port of my TV. I was blown away by how clear it was !! The video was clearer than some of the stations I view in HD.
On playback, you are given a thumbnail of the first frame of each scene you shot when you turned the camera on. On playback, you can skip around the scenes you want to view , or delete if needed. The focus assist is another nice feature. When you use it, it momentarily zooms in on the middle of your next shot so that you can fine focus if needed.
It has many other features that I have not tried yet. On editing, bought the Pinnacle 12 Ultimate because it is set up to handle the AVHCD format and a PC with the AMD quad Phenom processor with 3 GB of RAM. Waiting for a more powerful graphics card to arrive before trying to edit in this new format. The battery that came with it is small. Would recommend buying the larger battery as soon as you can to balance it out. Right now, it feels a little out of balance because of the smaller battery. Also liked the solid magnesium body. No plastic anywhere ! Overall, I am impressed with this camera.
Very clear video, much clearer than my trusty old Canon GL-2 It does not come with an HDMI cable. Bought one locally and tried it. Plugged one end into the HDMI out port on the camera and the other end into the HDMI port of my TV. I was blown away by how clear it was !! The video was clearer than some of the stations I view in HD.
On playback, you are given a thumbnail of the first frame of each scene you shot when you turned the camera on. On playback, you can skip around the scenes you want to view , or delete if needed. The focus assist is another nice feature. When you use it, it momentarily zooms in on the middle of your next shot so that you can fine focus if needed.
It has many other features that I have not tried yet. On editing, bought the Pinnacle 12 Ultimate because it is set up to handle the AVHCD format and a PC with the AMD quad Phenom processor with 3 GB of RAM. Waiting for a more powerful graphics card to arrive before trying to edit in this new format. The battery that came with it is small. Would recommend buying the larger battery as soon as you can to balance it out. Right now, it feels a little out of balance because of the smaller battery. Also liked the solid magnesium body. No plastic anywhere ! Overall, I am impressed with this camera.
30 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
Not worth the price, but there is not much alternative
(3 out of 5) by Cornelius Fortinbras III on Aug 19, 2009 (Madagascar)Panasonic AG-HMC150
I shoot weddings and I have used The HMC150, the Canon AH1.
From the beginning let me first tell you where my opinion is coming from - price tag: $3500
First off, neither of these cameras are brilliant in low light. They have 1/3 imagers. I don't care if they are made of gold and there are ten of them.
1/3 imagers are too small to gather enough light, even if you attached the Hubbell telescope to them.
To put such tiny sensors in a $3500 is poor, cheap engineering especially when SLR have larger sensors, shoot HD and don't cost this much.
Who are these camera angled at?
Videographers and indie filmmakers.
As a videographer what are you most concerned with - Low light.
Why? Because you cannot control lights at weddings at parties, etc. So your camera has to be able to handle it.
As an Indie filmmaker what are you most concerned with - The ability to look like film. It does, with 24p and film gamma, it's about all you need. But you are paying a premium. But for me, equally important to film look as 24fps is lens choice. Here you get none. While 24fps is what is ingrained in the everyone's consciousness as what film should look like, they also don't realize that shallow depth of field and variety of lenses is too. With these camcorders you get no choice, a 13x zoom with extremely wide depth of field at most every focal distance, because it's a zoom and because the imagers are tiny.
Good news The AG-HMC150 can handle most lighting situations.
Bad news - AVCHD codec, is noisy in even bright sunlight afternoons. The image is made of blotch.
Measuring image integrity by zoom factor - at 100% AVCHD compression is clearly visible. 200% the image is a swarming, infected mess.
Although the Panny can holdup in low light. I shot in a dark club and there was still something to see.
It has a very weird auto iris mode, that brings in more light, even when you do exact settings in manual.
Don't know if there is a magic switch, didn't have it long enough to work everything out.
The Canon uses HDV and instead of compression codec noise, you get digital noise; unpleasant grain (not like film), and washed out video at 100%. At 200% it's like looking at a digital still from a 10 year old point and shoot. And trust me, once an image is washed out and grainy, there is very little you can do (Some gamma correction will bring the shadows back to life, but that noise is there to stay. And the drop down to SD doesn't do it any favors.
Bottom line the Canon sucks in low light, especially in anything other than auto mode. I shot in a low light room and the image was garbage. Despite some settings tweaking, which leads me to Canon's second biggest problem and a problem with these camcorders in general.
The LCD and the Viewfinder are too small to see how your image is holding up. Everything looked fabulous on the Canon's 2.7 LCD...and then when you get it back to edit. Noise city. So you can only use the LCD for just basic image checking.
The HMC150 has a 3.5 LCD, but the brilliant engineers made it a 4:3 ratio! You have black matting in the image! The camera can only shoot 16x9 and they put a 4x3 LCD on it...so in the end you only get about 2.7" of real estate and you see as much as on the Canon, unless you are in focus assist mode which zooms in and uses the whole LCD.
So you have to know your settings and be shutter/iris paranoid, hoping for the best image. What you see is not what you get, you have to know what you want, like with film and set the camera accordingly, knowing which settings will get you want in the END, not what you are looking at through the camera.
The HMC150 definitely benefits from the higher rez. The Canon is 1440x1080. You can see the difference.
The Canon is more professionally built. Both plastic, but the canon feels more professional, and weirdly the HMC feels like a Tonka Toy, hard textured plastic, but like a light and chunky toy. I can hear the optical stabilizer clunking around in it. The Canon aesthetically looks more professional.
Audio on the Canon is better, it has much better limiter, I don't even think the HMC's is useful, but if you plug one xlr mic into the Canon...the onboard becomes unusable. HMC lets you assign channels for the onboard. Bad news is the onboard mic on both sucks, the Canon sounds better because the HDV format has higher rez than the compressed AVCHD codec.
The HMC and it's tapeless/AVCHD codec does not save much time, the transcoding takes almost as long if not longer than real time (HDV tape) and sometimes there are errors, especially transferring from camera, the footage speeds up, the audio remains constant and you have shorter clips. Happened constantly. My guess, USB and it's non constant data rate. Another cheap short cut by Panasonic. The Canon has a firewire, which speed is constant, and they need it for the HDV tapes.
The HMC wins out with higher rez, native progressive imagers, resulting in two true progressive modes, 24fps, the other mode/rez are wrapped in pulldowns. The Canon's 24f, etc modes are fake and you can tell. Everything is interlaced on the Canon. I hate interlaced.
This review isn't structured very well, but I don't have the energy, since I'm so unenthusiastic about both, so they're not worth more time. But I thought I would let potential buyers know, the ones who think these two cameras are the Holy Grail. They aren't, and they aren't worth the high price tag, they are worth $2000 not a penny more. But the problem is, what else is there?
I returned the HMC, and I didn't the Canon wasn't mine, but would have returned it too.
I'm going to try the Canon SLR route. The closest thing you can get to film without shooting it.
Annoyingly these two manufacturers and Sony...are all sticking it to us. Instead of advancing things, they are taking baby steps, giving us one desired function at a time for a price.
If Canon can put a full frame sensor in their 5d II and can give it 1920x1080 30fps shooting, why can't they put that sensor in a camcorder, with a SLR interchangeable lens mount, with XLR inputs?
Because they want to sell camcorders AND slr cameras.
These camcorders are just big consumer cams. They don't have enough image improvement to warrant $2500+ more in cost. You are paying for features, limited manual adjustments, not image upgrade.
But of course I didn't have it for very long, two weeks.
I just couldn't get over the price versus video quality, and workflow.
They don't justify the price, especially when I think we are very close to getting some real breakthroughs in HD imaging.
I shoot weddings and I have used The HMC150, the Canon AH1.
From the beginning let me first tell you where my opinion is coming from - price tag: $3500
First off, neither of these cameras are brilliant in low light. They have 1/3 imagers. I don't care if they are made of gold and there are ten of them.
1/3 imagers are too small to gather enough light, even if you attached the Hubbell telescope to them.
To put such tiny sensors in a $3500 is poor, cheap engineering especially when SLR have larger sensors, shoot HD and don't cost this much.
Who are these camera angled at?
Videographers and indie filmmakers.
As a videographer what are you most concerned with - Low light.
Why? Because you cannot control lights at weddings at parties, etc. So your camera has to be able to handle it.
As an Indie filmmaker what are you most concerned with - The ability to look like film. It does, with 24p and film gamma, it's about all you need. But you are paying a premium. But for me, equally important to film look as 24fps is lens choice. Here you get none. While 24fps is what is ingrained in the everyone's consciousness as what film should look like, they also don't realize that shallow depth of field and variety of lenses is too. With these camcorders you get no choice, a 13x zoom with extremely wide depth of field at most every focal distance, because it's a zoom and because the imagers are tiny.
Good news The AG-HMC150 can handle most lighting situations.
Bad news - AVCHD codec, is noisy in even bright sunlight afternoons. The image is made of blotch.
Measuring image integrity by zoom factor - at 100% AVCHD compression is clearly visible. 200% the image is a swarming, infected mess.
Although the Panny can holdup in low light. I shot in a dark club and there was still something to see.
It has a very weird auto iris mode, that brings in more light, even when you do exact settings in manual.
Don't know if there is a magic switch, didn't have it long enough to work everything out.
The Canon uses HDV and instead of compression codec noise, you get digital noise; unpleasant grain (not like film), and washed out video at 100%. At 200% it's like looking at a digital still from a 10 year old point and shoot. And trust me, once an image is washed out and grainy, there is very little you can do (Some gamma correction will bring the shadows back to life, but that noise is there to stay. And the drop down to SD doesn't do it any favors.
Bottom line the Canon sucks in low light, especially in anything other than auto mode. I shot in a low light room and the image was garbage. Despite some settings tweaking, which leads me to Canon's second biggest problem and a problem with these camcorders in general.
The LCD and the Viewfinder are too small to see how your image is holding up. Everything looked fabulous on the Canon's 2.7 LCD...and then when you get it back to edit. Noise city. So you can only use the LCD for just basic image checking.
The HMC150 has a 3.5 LCD, but the brilliant engineers made it a 4:3 ratio! You have black matting in the image! The camera can only shoot 16x9 and they put a 4x3 LCD on it...so in the end you only get about 2.7" of real estate and you see as much as on the Canon, unless you are in focus assist mode which zooms in and uses the whole LCD.
So you have to know your settings and be shutter/iris paranoid, hoping for the best image. What you see is not what you get, you have to know what you want, like with film and set the camera accordingly, knowing which settings will get you want in the END, not what you are looking at through the camera.
The HMC150 definitely benefits from the higher rez. The Canon is 1440x1080. You can see the difference.
The Canon is more professionally built. Both plastic, but the canon feels more professional, and weirdly the HMC feels like a Tonka Toy, hard textured plastic, but like a light and chunky toy. I can hear the optical stabilizer clunking around in it. The Canon aesthetically looks more professional.
Audio on the Canon is better, it has much better limiter, I don't even think the HMC's is useful, but if you plug one xlr mic into the Canon...the onboard becomes unusable. HMC lets you assign channels for the onboard. Bad news is the onboard mic on both sucks, the Canon sounds better because the HDV format has higher rez than the compressed AVCHD codec.
The HMC and it's tapeless/AVCHD codec does not save much time, the transcoding takes almost as long if not longer than real time (HDV tape) and sometimes there are errors, especially transferring from camera, the footage speeds up, the audio remains constant and you have shorter clips. Happened constantly. My guess, USB and it's non constant data rate. Another cheap short cut by Panasonic. The Canon has a firewire, which speed is constant, and they need it for the HDV tapes.
The HMC wins out with higher rez, native progressive imagers, resulting in two true progressive modes, 24fps, the other mode/rez are wrapped in pulldowns. The Canon's 24f, etc modes are fake and you can tell. Everything is interlaced on the Canon. I hate interlaced.
This review isn't structured very well, but I don't have the energy, since I'm so unenthusiastic about both, so they're not worth more time. But I thought I would let potential buyers know, the ones who think these two cameras are the Holy Grail. They aren't, and they aren't worth the high price tag, they are worth $2000 not a penny more. But the problem is, what else is there?
I returned the HMC, and I didn't the Canon wasn't mine, but would have returned it too.
I'm going to try the Canon SLR route. The closest thing you can get to film without shooting it.
Annoyingly these two manufacturers and Sony...are all sticking it to us. Instead of advancing things, they are taking baby steps, giving us one desired function at a time for a price.
If Canon can put a full frame sensor in their 5d II and can give it 1920x1080 30fps shooting, why can't they put that sensor in a camcorder, with a SLR interchangeable lens mount, with XLR inputs?
Because they want to sell camcorders AND slr cameras.
These camcorders are just big consumer cams. They don't have enough image improvement to warrant $2500+ more in cost. You are paying for features, limited manual adjustments, not image upgrade.
But of course I didn't have it for very long, two weeks.
I just couldn't get over the price versus video quality, and workflow.
They don't justify the price, especially when I think we are very close to getting some real breakthroughs in HD imaging.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Nothing new to add... other than I love this camera
(5 out of 5) by Michael Harvey on Jan 16, 2009 (Renton, WA United States)One thing you need to keep in mind is that editing AVCCam/AVCHD is a P.I.T.A. I'm using CS4 on a 2.4 quadcore with 8gig of RAM and Vista64 and it's sluggish with frequent lockups. I'm getting Cineform ProspectHD v4 when it comes out to compensate. Vegas 8.0c and Edius works well I'm told, and FCP need to convert it to ProRes (or whatever it's called). I think Avid needs to convert it to a native codec as well. Panasonic does offer a free converter to DVCProHD on there website
[Update 6/5/09... Premiere CS4 4.1 update is out, and editing is much easier. Also, Prospect v4 is out, and editing with the demo I've been trying has been a joy]
That said... the camera itself is awesome. Really. I'm coming from the DVX, and this is leaps and bounds above that (which is saying something). The images I'm getting are beautiful. I'm planning on going out now on my days off to shoot just for the fun of it.
I really can't add anything that hasn't been said already by others. But if you're looking at the HVX200a or HPX170 (they all share the same chips, and the HMC shares the same glass as the HPX), but don't want to deal with the costs of P2 or need all of the features of the HPX or HVX, I would HIGHLY recommend buying this instead.
Just be prepared for some editing headaches at first (the problem with bleeding edge technology is sometimes you need to get stitches).
[Update 6/5/09... Premiere CS4 4.1 update is out, and editing is much easier. Also, Prospect v4 is out, and editing with the demo I've been trying has been a joy]
That said... the camera itself is awesome. Really. I'm coming from the DVX, and this is leaps and bounds above that (which is saying something). The images I'm getting are beautiful. I'm planning on going out now on my days off to shoot just for the fun of it.
I really can't add anything that hasn't been said already by others. But if you're looking at the HVX200a or HPX170 (they all share the same chips, and the HMC shares the same glass as the HPX), but don't want to deal with the costs of P2 or need all of the features of the HPX or HVX, I would HIGHLY recommend buying this instead.
Just be prepared for some editing headaches at first (the problem with bleeding edge technology is sometimes you need to get stitches).
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
OutStanding Picture Quality for the Price
(5 out of 5) by Le Roy D. Candelaria on Feb 24, 2009 (Ontario, California)I am completely happy with this camera's performance. I'm still learning some of the finer in and outs of it but I am completely satisfied with its color pick up and picture quality.
The recording media is very affordable, I bought to 16gb class 6 SDHC cards when i purchased this camera and so far is the easiest format to use especially if you come from a background using dslr's. The formatting must be done in the camera if anyone is wondering, and if you do format the sd card in your computer you will get an error message once you pop in.
My only problem with this camera is the AVCHD editing. It's a monster to edit and rendering is a painful process. I'm buying a new computer to accommodate the editing process because I currently can't effectively edit my work with the duo core processor I have at home. In my office I have a Core2 Quad and it is also kind of sluggish and rendering in any of the HD formats is about 15:1 (minute) ratio. It's just ridiculous.
But enough of that, I did enough research to know that the editing would be a beast, I just wasn't truly aware of the true impact it would have on me.
All in all this camera is an exceptional product and I am extremely pleased with my investment.
2/25/09 I forgot to mention these cards can be played in a PS3, which is a great feature for reviewing the days shoot. =)
7/10/09 So it's been 5 months now and I recently hooked up with a local magazine to do their internet video content. [...]
I still love this camera and it is DEFINITELY one of the BEST INVESTMENTS I have made on any type of equipment I have ever owned.
The recording media is very affordable, I bought to 16gb class 6 SDHC cards when i purchased this camera and so far is the easiest format to use especially if you come from a background using dslr's. The formatting must be done in the camera if anyone is wondering, and if you do format the sd card in your computer you will get an error message once you pop in.
My only problem with this camera is the AVCHD editing. It's a monster to edit and rendering is a painful process. I'm buying a new computer to accommodate the editing process because I currently can't effectively edit my work with the duo core processor I have at home. In my office I have a Core2 Quad and it is also kind of sluggish and rendering in any of the HD formats is about 15:1 (minute) ratio. It's just ridiculous.
But enough of that, I did enough research to know that the editing would be a beast, I just wasn't truly aware of the true impact it would have on me.
All in all this camera is an exceptional product and I am extremely pleased with my investment.
2/25/09 I forgot to mention these cards can be played in a PS3, which is a great feature for reviewing the days shoot. =)
7/10/09 So it's been 5 months now and I recently hooked up with a local magazine to do their internet video content. [...]
I still love this camera and it is DEFINITELY one of the BEST INVESTMENTS I have made on any type of equipment I have ever owned.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Fantasic product, great Post Path
(5 out of 5) by David Hutt on Feb 24, 2009 (Santa Barbara, CA)This new HD camcorder which is capable of saving 1080p video to SDHC memory cards is fantastic. The footage we are taking is very impressive, sharp with great HD depth of field. Be sure to register it through Panasonic to ensure your 3 years of warranty coverage. An important note: I also got the Panasonic PZ850U TV which includes an SDHC slot. The PZ850U line from Panasonic will play the raw HD video fromthe SDHC cards without ANY transcoding! This enables me to sit back and watch the footage, make notes on the clip numbers, time points and greatly simplify the content that needs to go into post production.