O i know

and your right

i was just venting on my students a bit

I wonder how long it's going to take for these things to trickle down to the distributers

With 1/4" sensors and a max bit rate of 13 Mbps I'd be skeptical of using this camera for any professional purpose. and few amateurs would want a camera this bulky and obtrusive. It would make more sense to do a shoulder-mount version of the HMC150, which sounds like a promising entry-level pro camera.

My DVC30's have 1/4 inch sensors and my clients have been very happy with their video.

I know a guy who use to shoot high school football games for a local news station (freelance) and when sony introduced there line of HDV cameras he was thinking about getting one. He called up his contact at the station and said "do you guys care if i start shooting on miniDV, to me it looks as good as the beta i've been shooting" and they where like "no way a handy cam (there opinion of sonys 3 chip 1/4 camera) can be "broadcast quality"

so.... not wanting to spend a ton of money on a new "broadcast quality" camera he bought the camera he wanted and would dub the tapes to Beta before delivery...

He got lots of complements on his new Beta cam

the proof is in the pudding as they say and i suppose we will see
for me all it has to do is look better than my current crop of SD cameras and that seems to be a no brainer

The original Sony HDV cameras have three 1/3" sensors which are barely adequate in some situations (e.g. low light), so 1/4" sensors seem "iffy" for HD recording. And using a maximum bit rate of 13 Mbps instead of the higher rates in the HMC150 is also problematic. I hope someone has the sense to make an inexpensive shoulder-mounted camera with more advanced features, since this one and the similar Sony seem too limiting.

I had one of the 70's for 3 days .... not good news from a usability POV I'm afraid.

All manual control (exposure, focus, WB) has to be done via the menu system and the little up/down/left/right buttons. This is *extremely* ungainly and when I tried it while shooting (off the shoulder with the viewfinder) more often that not I ended up picking my nose while trying to locate the buttons! IMO this makes the unit unusable for anything that requires dynamic manual control while shooting. If you can set up shots, rehearse, check settings ... then maybe.

There's no assignable dial, or knob for any adjustable camera parameter. IMO it's bizarre!

On the plus side the Audio panel is great! The zoom rocker is surprisingly controllable, the viewfinder is tiny ... but OK'ish..., nice output pluggery, I like the idea of the SD cards, (maybe when Apple integrate AVCHD encoder/decoder hardware for editing it'll be more attractive).

Pictures were... well, better than SD but not as nice as what I've seen from Canon's HV20. They seemed somehow lifeless.

The unit is ... lets face it... butt ugly. I showed it to lots of students (to see if they could figure it out). To a person they all laughed out loud saying it looked like their dad's old VHS from when they were kids. (somehow I don't think the audio obsession with 'vintage' has crossed over to cameras yet!)

No one found it intuitive .... everyone said they didn't want to use it.

I'm afraid Panasonic has blown this. It's not good at any price point. And to think 1 assignable dial could have changed all that....

Lee

Lee - I'd imagine you've just confirmed many people's suspicions with your review. Sometimes I think these camera manufactures are brain dead.

Maybe they should let someone who actually uses a camera now and again do an initial design and let the engineers figure out how to make it work rather than the other way around.

Ooh, nice, hadn't seen this one, looks definitely like a sony hvr-hd1000 clone to me. Must have been the same engineers that build it after a night out drinking Belgian (real) beer. :)

I don't understand it either, why on earth do they make these kind of camera's, looks like a pro but handles like a minicam. though, looks? It looks like something made by lego is you'd ask me.