Panasonic HDC-SX5 AVCHD 3CCD High Definition Flash Memory & DVD Camcorder with 10X Optical Image Stabilized Zoom

I had this camera with me in a trip to California and it was great. Very good battery life, great colors. Overall very satisfied with it.

This camera works great and has spectacular HD quality. Low-light shooting is a bit of an issue with auto-focus, but overall it was an excellent buy for the price.

Well worth the price and then some. I'm tempted to give it 5 stars due to price but the low light picture is not good enough and AVCHD is too annoying at this time.

Pros:
- HD Camcorder with 3 CCD and O.I.S. (prevents blurry images)
- 2 Good and inexpensive media options (mini DVD and SDHC)
- AVCHD Should have a long future ahead with Blu-Ray winning the HD war
- Easy to use
- All the features I need and more
- Crisp vivid footage outside and in bright lighting
- Price (About half that of similar camcorders)

Cons
- Not the best HD image in low to standard indoor situations (Even in low light it is much better than my standard def camcorder but not 'crisp')
- Not as 'cute' as some other smaller camcorders
- AVCHD is all but impossible to edit easily with today's h/w and s/w. (I anticipate this will get better)
- You need a Blu-Ray player to play AVCHD. (You can use the camcorder to play the movies until the ps3 or blu-ray players prices drop.. or if new DVD players get the codex for AVCHD)

Over all I am quite happy. Once I get a Blu-ray player and a better PC to edit the video it will be great. But for now the picture is great and the remote that comes in the box makes using the camcorder as the player easy. I figure could wait for the prices to drop on blu-ray and better AVCHD editing to come out... but I might miss a couple of years of HD family movies so I'll deal with some inconvenience today for better video for tomorrow.

This is a great camera. To truly enjoy it, a Blu-ray player is required.

Sure, it's not perfect, but for the price, you simply cannot beat this. Pick up a couple of 8GB memorycards and you are good to go (they are cheap!).

Pluses:
-Optical Image Stabilizer
-HD!!!! (1920x1080i) - Good Quality in daylight/normal light indoors
-SDHC cards (cheap and high capacity)
-DVD burner if you want to make Standard Def captures and burn for regular dvd playback. (can also be used to store HD content, but needs special players for playback)
-Battery Capacity is very good
-Nice LCD Screen
-Prerec, if activated, it continously records the last 3 seconds, so when you hit record, it will remember and store the previous 3 seconds as well. Good if you are a bit slow to start recording..

Minuses:
-A bit large and clumsy (partly due to inclusion of dvd burner and large capacity battery!)
-Noisy picture in low light situations

Note: Works well with PS3, if you have the 80GB version, stick the SDHC card in directly, if you own the 40GB version, buy a cheap USB adapter that supports SDHC.