Panasonic SDR-H60 review

This hard disk camcorder may not have the refined looks of Sony's DCR-SR55E, but it has impressive features. The most obvious of these is the 60GB hard disk, which holds 14 hours of video at the highest quality setting of 10Mbit/s.

As well as the hard disk, you get a massive 50x optical zoom, letting you fill the frame with distant subjects. Thankfully, the camcorder also has optical image stabilisation, which almost completely eliminates camera shake when shooting with the zoom on. What's more, unlike electronic stabilisation, it doesn't reduce image quality when applied.

Unfortunately, video quality wasn't as good as we'd hoped. In a direct comparison with Sony's DCR-SR55E, this camcorder's images had more noise both indoors and outdoors. This was compounded by compression issues, reducing the level of perceivable detail. Colours were a little off as well, with bricks appearing more purple than orange.

The battery is neatly tucked away in a battery bay, and slides out from the bottom of the camcorder. However, this means you can't fit a larger replacement. Thankfully, it lasted a very respectable one hour and 39 minutes in our test. Like most Panasonic models, the SDR-H60 comes with a separate charger.

A USB port lets you connect to your PC, and getting recordings off the camcorder was a simple drag-and-drop procedure. The MPEG2-compressed files can be placed directly into most editing software, but you may need to change the file extension from .mod to .mpg first. There's no S-video output, so you're stuck with a lower-quality composite signal through the AV output when connecting to a TV.

There's an SDHC memory card slot should you ever need extra storage capacity. Photos can be taken, but the resolution is limited to 640x480. Settings are easily handled using a small joystick, which can be used to set aperture and shutter speeds manually.

The SDR-H60 has impressive features, but video quality didn't meet our expectations. If you want a hard disk camcorder, you should buy Sony's cheaper DCR-SR55E instead.