I shot a couple test stills, with the HMC40, at the highest resolution, and frankly they simply were not 10 megapixel photos in any practical sense, despite the number of pixels recorded. Viewing at 100% magnification, they were just plain awful (highly visible noise and artifacts). Even resized down considerably, they don't look particularly good. For anyone shooting video with the HMC40, but also wanting to shoot some stills, even getting a relatively low cost point and shoot camera is probably a much better way to go.

It's not what I would call a point and shoot (not a DSLR either though), but I've seen Olympus C-8080s sell for well under $200 on eBay recently. I've had a C-8080 for years now (which I don't use that often anymore, since I got a Canon DSLR) and it will shoot photos that just knock the snot out of stills from an HMC40.

for those of you who have shot the canon xha1(which i had and just sold), and are now using the hmc 40 panasonic...do you notice aliasing and motion, color artifacts in finer detail of landscapes, or ocean, water movement like there is on the canon dslr videos? bill