Thread: Panasonic HDC-SD5 Digital Camera

The world's smallest and lightest 3CCD HD camcorder. Why should you care? Simply because the combination of 3CCD colour reproduction, 1o8oi AVCHD hi-def and tiny form-factor SD-card recording make this the most exciting' corder ever.Capturing life's most exciting moments - a cat falling off a wall Unless you're or your child uttering its first swear word - can be difficult. Unless you're a clairvoyant it's easy to miss the crucial moment. The SD5 gets around that with its Pre-Rec mode, which constantly buffers three seconds of footage, which are then added to the beginning of the clip when you push the record button.

Panasonic's got pally with the lens legends at Leica to create the SD5' s Dicomar lens. It uses low dispersion glass and multi-coated lens elements to minimise chromatic aberration. That's a pretty geeky sentence to spout down the pub, so let's just say it should mean less colour blurring and crisper, clearer videos, free of ghosting and flaring.Sony CX6EK. Formerly the lightest cam in town. Perhaps better for stills.

If you're a fanatical fan of Panasonic products (and why the hell shouldn't you be7) the 5D5 will have you stamping your feet and clapping your hands with glee. Link it to a Viera TV via HDMI and you'll be able to control it with your remote via on-screen prompts. With a Viera PZ700 you can view Full HD video via the card slot. Other sets will let you flick through your JPEGs.



Great news for supershaky-handed shooters: Panasonic's crammed a new image stabilisation system (Advanced 0.1.5) into the SD5. It compensates eight times more frequently than the previous version - an insane 4000 times a second. Perfect for hiding your childish excitement when you're watching a Disney parade. We bet you'll still giggle when Mickey shakes your hand.

The SD5 uses AVCHD, which lets you create discs with a standard DVD burner but play them on a Blu-ray spinner. Bad news: if you want to watch your footage on your bog standard DVD deck, you'll have to drop the quality to the standard def DVD-Video format. Still, the SD5 will cram three hours of standard def footage onto an 8GB card.