Panasonic HDC-SD9 review

If there were an award for the most attractive and compact camcorder, the HDC-SD9 would win it. Despite being small, it's still comfortable to hold and, best of all, it doesn't sacrifice video quality for portability.

It has three CCDs with 560,000 pixels each, but working together they generate progressive 25fps video with a resolution of 1,920x1,080. The results are a huge leap up from those of the standard-definition camcorders here. There's a wealth of extra detail to see, though colours can be a little oversaturated.

Video is compressed using the AVCHD standard, with a bit rate of 17Mbit/s at the highest quality setting. We couldn't see any serious compression problems with the video, though the HDC-SD9 doesn't deal with fast pans as well as Canon's HV30. Video is stored on an SDHC card. You'll get around two hours on a 16GB SDHC, which costs around £50.

The camcorder's LCD display has more than twice the amount of detail of most displays here. This gives you a much better idea of what you're recording. Due to the camcorder's small size, the joystick that controls the menus is positioned perpendicular to the screen, on the side of the body. This makes navigating the menus less intuitive, but shouldn't trouble the kind of casual users the camcorder is aimed at.

Such users are also unlikely to be bothered by the lack of a mic input or accessory shoe. They will appreciate the face-tracking feature that automatically adjusts focus and exposure, making the most of friends' mugs.

The built-in microphone records to 5.1-channel Dolby Digital, though gives no real advantage over Sony's three-channel system. Other handy features include an automatic lens cover and optical image stabilisation. The latter works well, keeping shots steady even at the maximum 10x zoom setting. The battery lasted for a respectable one hour and 40 minutes, and larger replacements can be fitted.

Canon's HV30 may produce higher-quality video, but the HDC-SD9's compact shape, convenient storage and lower price make it a Best Buy.