What Did You Get For Christmas?

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• Tags: camcorder, camera, christmas, DVD, Panasonic, SDR-H18

I’ll ask you before everyone else does. What did you get for Christmas? Me? I got a new digital camcorder. I picked it out myself. I chose the Panasonic SDR-H18 with 30GB Hard Disk Drive. I am very pleased. The best part is that I no longer have to worry about having a tape available when I want to record some video! This frees me up to record whenever I want. I can grab the camera and start recording any moment the whim hits me. It automatically records new video clips in the free hard drive space. The 30GB hard drive seems plenty large enough especially when you consider that a 4.7GB DVD will hold ~2 hours of video. I cannot rave enough about how much I am enjoying this camera.

What I love most about the SDR-H18 is of course the hard drive, but there are also some other notable features. It has 32X optical zoom, a slot for SD cards, and built-in image stabilization. The 32X optical zoom gives me the ability to shoot almost anything I can see. So far, I have standardized all my electronic gadgets including my digital camera, mobile phone, digital picture frame,and now my camcorder so they all use SD cards. This makes it easy to share media between devices. Finally, I am please with the image stabilization feature. It keeps my video from appearing to bumpy. These were all things that contributed directly to my buying decision.

Of course, no device or gadget is perfect. My two biggest gripes about the Panasonic SDR-H18 is the location of the USB port and the quality of the video when recording in low light. The USB port is located behind the battery which is insane! You have to remove the battery to transfer your video to your PC. This may have been done on purpose so that you have to be on AC power when transferring, but it sure would be nice to copy a short clip to your PC without having to switch power sources. Video gets grainy in low light and the SDR-H18 does not have a built-in light source. I obviously didn’t consider either of these issues deal-breakers, but they are occasional annoyances.

Overall, I am very happy with what I got for Christmas. How about you? Leave a comment and let me know what you received from Santa. It might be something the rest of us will want to add to our wish lists.