Impulse Buy

[Bobby]

My wife and I were browsing through the local Best Buy today. She has taken some video in the past using the family (re: my) camcorder but hasn't done that in a while. But she takes stills by the boatload.

Anyhow, I was thinking of getting her a Flip-type camera so we went to take a look at them. When we compared prices, we found that some of the low end flash card "standard" camcorders were not too much more expensive, but quite a bit more capable.

We ended up buying a Panasonic SDR-S26 unit. Very small, very light (.52 lb.), has a 70x optical zoom, and seems to yield adequate video quality (still testing). This is something she can use easily, and slip into a purse for not much more size and price than a Flip x 1.5 or so.

380K video pixels in 16:9
SDHC cards (bought an 8GB there are a, well, acceptable price)
10Mbps in best quality mode
MPEG2 (generates .mpg files)
mechanical image stabilization

Cons:
Manual lens closure (not powered, but that may be a good thing as no mechanism to break)
low light performance
only 950 mah battery

Price was $270 at Best Buy - about the same as seen on the 'net.

I am going to start her on Windows Movie Maker and see what happens.

I will keep all y'all posted. Oh, and did I say it was light, and small!

[momoffduty]

Was looking at the Flips for a gift back at Christmas time. The sales guy said the zooms on all of the flips would result in loss of quality. Does this camera have a different type of zoom compared to the flips? 1/2 lb is light!

[Bobby]

The Pain-in-Stomach (an old joke of my father-in law's) has a standard 1/8" CCD sensor and what looks like a standard camcorder lens F1.9-F5.7 with a 37mm filter thread in it - just like my HV-30. So I assume it is a standard zoom - nothing in the booklet talks about lens design, groups, etc.

And it is one heck of a zoom - 70x and that is true optical zoom.

Also the form factor fits in your hand, like a standard camcorder. I would think the Flip format would be more difficult to hold.

If you are in the market for a Flip, take a look at this one.

[Steve Grisetti]

Though I hope it goes without saying that the 3ivx codec the camera uses for its MP4s makes it challenging to edit the video without converting it.

So it's best not to use it as a "serious" camcorder.

[Bobby]

Thanks Steve. Yes, this is just for my wife's sandbox. BUT I did copy one of the files over to my system, fired up PRE7 and it seemed to load and edit with no problems. Guess I just have the right CODEC?

What type of problems should I be looking for?

I also noticed that their supplied software doesn't have an export function - unfortunate.

[Steve Grisetti]

I think they're the kinds of problems that, if you have to look for them, you must not have them.

[Bobby]

A report:

The camera seems to be working well. Quality seems good, autofocus good, low light could be better, auto white balance seems very good. 70x zoom is great, but definitely need a tripod to use its full range. Image stabilization seems fairly effective, but haven't done a very exhaustive test.

But I have achieved my primary purpose, which was to get my wife into the video hobby. She is starting to take some"snapshot" videos around the place and hopefully a lot of the grandkids when they visit this weekend. She was actually able to get it into WMM and write a DVD - she was pretty excited about that.

I am sure I will regret not having HD in the future, but didn't want to pay the big bucks right now. And by the time she is ready, the consumer entry level stuff should be much cheaper anyhow.