Customer Rating: 
Summary: Most Interesting Camera
Comment: First of all, this is my first camcorder. We do have the ability to use our small Canon digital camera in this mode but this is a far cry from that. I was excited to get one of the first even though I figured I would be taking a slight gamble as I am not exactly that informed on the subject and wonder about the wisdom of getting a product that is not yet proven.
So far, so good...Our grandchild had a birthday the very day this thing came in so I was determined to figure things out in order to capture the event. I figured that we paid a premium price to have the high HD quality so of course I shot in the highest mode. I only had time to charge the battery and skim through the book but I am happy to report that the quality of the videos was simply outstanding. In my opinion, the easy part is taking the pictures...set it to the quality and mode and fire away. Then, the question is, what to do afterwards...This is the hard part.
I have an Intel Mac and IMovie 08 so I read other reviews of similar cameras and figured out how to move the shots from the camera to the computer. No problem. In my opinion, and that is what these reviews are all about, if you are shooting at the highest quality, you better have a lot of room on your hard drives, and, or, prepare to spend a lot of time on the back end moving your videos off the camera and on to disks or the drives. I did not have much hard drive space left on my Mac so perhaps that fact made things seem very slow. On the other hand, because I wanted to shoot in the highest quality, the wait and trouble were worth the investment...Remember, I am just at the edge of knowing what I am doing so you must consider that my skill level is still very low by comparison.
The great thing about this camera, in addition to the fact that the HD videos are breathtaking, is that the built in hard drive is 120 gigs...wow! that is equal to 82 of the smaller 3 inch DVDs! About 45 hours of recording time on lower quality and near 11 hours or so in the highest quality...so, unless you get nervous about hard drive failure, you can go for a long time without having to move them off the camcorder.
After doing a little reading and fiddling around, I hooked the camera up to our HD TV and was pretty much able to use the little remote device and see the videos. Simply outstanding...most shots were taken in the house with average lighting. One of my concerns was reading that low light might cause grainy videos but I did not find this to be the case....I suspect this could be the case when shooting in extremely low light but I cannot see this ever becoming an issue. I was too impatient to actually link into the HD ports of my TV so we settled for using the ports at the front and went to the game port...I do not think this was actually in HD but it still was just incredible. Later, when I played back some videos on our HP Vista computer and just was blown away with the quality...I had gone outside and take videos of the hummingbirds on our feeder and could not believe how crystal clear the shots were.
The 12X optical zoom is very close to walking up to the subject...very nice. The image stabilizer works great as I never used a tripod and still saw no real shaking. I did notice that you can negate image stabilizer when using the camera on a tripod so that was something I was a little concerned about.
One addition thing that may concern some...apparently these hard drive camcorders could suffer damage to the drives if used at an altitude of 9800 feet and above. If you are a serious mountain climber or plan to be above 9800 feet, you might consider other options.
I am very interested in reading other reviews. So far I am very pleased...no camera will ever be perfect and do all things so, regardless of the quality or cost, there will always be some element of compromise. I have already ordered another battery as well as an SD card for it. The battery life is short of two hours so trips out in the wild pretty much would demand more power. Most may not feel the need to have another battery but I cannot imagine missing any great shots...you pay too much for these things not to be able to use them to their fullest extent...maybe another review when I actually know what I am doing!
