Home > Consumer Reviews > Panasonic HDC-SD10 High Definition Flash Memory Camcorder With 16x Optical Zoom - Red

If any of you are thinking of perchasing this model I would say you have very good taste ... but. I have recently perchased an SD 10 and in due coarse took in on holiday with me and took some great footage, also stills. On returning I installed the software that comes with the camera and uploaded all the HD film and still images to my computor. The result`s on playback are very impressive, crystal clear film footage ect. This is where my euphoria stopped dead in it`s tracks.I then used the simple interface to burn the film to dvd, the program started the process of burning, I left the computor to do its business and returned an hour later to find to my horror that only 11% had been processed, a rough guestimate one hour of HD film would take 12 hours to burn onto three disk`s. I stopped the process and did a little blogging on the NET. In a nutshell you need a computor with at least a quad core processor, high def disk`s or blue ray disk`s and also blue ray player, the manipulation software to deal with the high definition film ( AVCHD ) format. Roxio 2009 is meant to be compatible but other software is very expensive at the moment. I have since sold on my SD 10 and perchased the SDR S26 SD wich is Panasonic`s (STANDARD DEFINITION) camcorder, my dual core and Roxio can deal with this format with no problem. I`ve stored my HD holiday footage on an external 1 terrabite hard drive for future burning. The moral of this story, make sure you have the means to burn and manipulate your HD film footage keeping in mind what I`ve said above. You can watch your footage on an HD ready tv via an HDMI cable plugged into your SD 10 camera, and also on your computor, but thats where the buck stops. The technology is still in it`s infancy and so is the burning software and computor hardware ..... be warned.

I bought this camcorder after seeing the ad on tv, as I really liked the idea of the intelligent tracking facility (just touch the subject you want to keep in focus/exposed and it follows it automatically)
I have to say it works extremely well, except in very high contrast situations (for instance, filming your child swimming on holiday!)
It really is a fantastic, easy to use camcorder which gives great results and fantastic picture quality.

Even in low light settings, it still gives pretty good colour reproduction - it also has a light which can help illuminate things.

You rarely need to change any of the settings to give good results (the only things I needed to change were white balance on a few occasions)
The controls are really well laid out and the design is great - it is very well put together.

The only negative I can think of is that slight wind noise is very much noticeable (even with the automatic wind reduction) BUT as I understand it, this is very common in the cheaper(!!!) end of the camcorder market. It is definitely better than our old JVC digital tape one though.

The ability to use SDHC cards, rather than loads of tapes is a huge plus - on one 16gb card, it will happily hold around 4 hours of footage at the 2nd best quality setting (at highest setting you are talking around 2 hours)

Overall, I am really pleased I bought this - it's really light, really small and packs a great picture, and I love the automatically adjusting LCD screen (goes brighter in bright conditions - even on our recent holiday in Rhodes the screen was still perfectly visible)

No doubt about it. The quality of picture is suberb. Fairly easy to use and if it wasn't for the fact that having captured the pictures the process of getting them into the pc and editing is a nightmare I would go well overboard recommending this. However, since not all editing software yet takes in AVCHD and, bearing in mind that many of us simple folk only have old software and cannot afford updates every minute, this restriction - and it is a restriction - is a serious set back.

On top of that one is faced with the arrogant attitude from Panasonic. Has any one successfully communicated with these creeps?

As I said in my letter to this high and mighty consortium if they couldn't bother to achnowledge my emails and letter and would not have another one of their products in my house.

And I won't

we based our purchase on favourable reviews and haven't been disappointed. The camera looks good, gives excellent pictures, is very compact and easy to use. A good purchase.

brilliant camcorder, very easy to use and can be taken anywhere.
Very easy to download pictures onto computer. have had a lot of fun since purchasing this.