Panasonic have managed to slim down their HDC-DX1 – a little. Panasonic’s latest entry to the highly competitive camcorder market just misses the mark a little in my opinion. It’s all a little wrong. It’s a little too heavy, a little too short on specs, and some of the design features leave me wondering who on earth let this one out of the gate before it was ready.

The battery sticks out of the back of the casing like it’s pleased to see you. And on top of that, Panasonic’s designers chose to hide the DC jack and HDMI terminal INSIDE the battery chamber. What this means is you have to remove the battery to use an external power source or watch recorded images on an HD monitor. Nuts.

Having said all that, the Panasonic HDC-SX5 has a kick-ass lens. Leica make some of the best lenses on the planet, and this ones no exception. Unfortunately, it’s let down by the image processing capabilities and in all tests has consistently been beaten by the competition.

For my money, the Sony HDR-CX7 offers a far better camera in this class, and is cheaper to boot. Back to the drawing board I think Mr. Panasonic.

Get it at amazon.com for around $830

If you are looking for something with some serious zoom capabilities, the Panasonic DMC-FZ18 is worth a look. An 18x zoom packed into a compact body. The equivalent focal range is 28 – 504. From wide angle to ultra zoom in a package weighing just 360 grams.

That’s a lot of power in a very small package. It makes me wonder where it will end. The first thing to note is that this is a Leica lens. Maybe not quite the same quality as Leica of old, but it still says Leica on the casing and that’s got to be worth something.

Panasonic have jammed just about every possible feature into this camera, and, all things considered, it performs very well. Certainly comparable with similarly priced models from Canon etc.

Image quality is good, as you would expect, with a little noise, but not bad for $400. The only real niggles I can find are the usual for these sort of cameras: The battery is a proprietary Panasonic battery costing over $40 and you can’t use AAs if you should run out of power in the field. And the memory capacity. 27MB doesn’t hold a lot of photos, so the true cost of the camera is hidden. Sony do the same thing with most of their range.

All in all, I find this to be a good little camera with a truly impressive zoom capability. AAs next time please.

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