Panasonic SDR-H20 review

The SDR-H20 is the first hard disk camcorder we've seen from Panasonic.

The company calls it a hybrid camcorder, as it can also store video on SD cards. The 30GB hard disk holds seven hours of footage at the highest quality setting of 9Mbit/s. This is the equivalent of seven MiniDV tapes or 21 8cm DVD-R discs, so it should be sufficient for a two-week holiday. If you run out of space, the SD memory card slot is compatible with SDHC cards, which have capacities of up to 8GB.

The hard disk camcorders we've seen in the past have been slimmer than MiniDV models. However, the SDR-H20 is fairly large despite having no viewfinder and an externally mounted battery. The battery has only a 60mAh capacity, but it lasted for an impressive hour and three-quarters of continuous recording. A separate charger is provided so you can charge a spare battery while using the camcorder.

The lack of a viewfinder means you must use the LCD screen to frame your shots. It's a 2.7in screen with 123,000 pixels, which is fairly standard on a camcorder at this price. It's bright and colours are well re-created. The menu system is easy to use, with the small thumb stick making navigation easy.

The camcorder is comfortable to hold, and all the controls are easy to reach. There's an AV output supporting S-video, composite and phono, and you can play clips by simply selecting a thumbnail on the display. A USB port lets you connect to a PC, and once you've installed the software you can easily access the video files on the hard disk. There's also a one-touch DVD copy feature that writes all your video files to a blank disc using your PC's DVD writer.

The traditional clip-on lens cap is disappointing, as similarly priced MiniDV models use automatic lens covers. However, there is a big 32x zoom for distant subjects and optical image stabilisation to help keep your shots steady. The latter is particularly useful as electronic stabilisation would use up part of the already small 1/6in CCD.

The quality of recorded video is respectable for the size of the CCD. It's roughly equivalent to the best budget MiniDV camcorders. Objects are fairly well defined and colours are true to life, but there's always some noise in the picture and this becomes much heavier in low-light conditions. The noise is softened by the MPEG2 video compression, but this can also obscure fine detail.

Despite being well designed and having a great battery life, the SDR-H20 is hard to recommend. MiniDV and DVD camcorders with far better video quality are available for less. If you really want a hard disk camcorder, we'd recommend spending a little more and getting a model with a larger CCD.