Panasonic HDC-HS9

For me the main advantage is the image quality, truly stunning on my 1080P plasma and a close second is the overall size of the unit, it can fit in your palm.

Nothing to do with the camera, but the cost of a spare battery is pricey.

very comfortable to hold whilst filming,lightweight.Good to be able to view thumbnails instead of having to view everything or search for what you want to see it's instantaneous.Puts you straight back to where you last filmed without gaps or overlap as i experienced with a previous mini-dv tape.Exactly what i wanted when downloading am able to put straight onto disc,pretty fast,excellent picture quality.

initially found the control stick difficult to manouvre around with as it is quite tiny,although i did read same in a review prior to purchasing,however after a little trial & error got used to it,but anyone with fat-fingers would struggle.

Small, easy to use, good quality pictures and video.

Not sure how easy it will be to get the format so it can be copied onto DVDs and played in DVD players. Pinnacle software supplied has to be purchased before use.

picture quality

controls for navigating menus on the camera small and difficult to operate

Ease of use, top of the range with picture clarity and colour, so easy to carry with you at all times.

availability and cost of batteries,with such a short life.

It is very small and so handy to use and carry.

Haven't found any yet.

Reasonably easy to use.

The supplied software is rubbish, unusable, unfriendly. It should be supplied with a simple software solution that allows editing of VCHD files.

good image quality and light weight

No good subsequent processing software available for the PC; hopefully this will change in future as the format becomes more widely used.

Very easy to use

The selling point for me was the HD picture quality but I soon realised that one of the major plus points was the extended battery life. Having the 60GB hard drive proved to be value for money instead of buying the HDCSD9 which is memory card only. The extra money spent on the hard drive was well worth it, giving you far more freedom with this product. With a two week holiday where filming was constant, the extra capacity of the hard drive was far more suitable that if I had had the memory card, or even extra cards.

Having had to really think hard about any bad points the one thing that I would have liked to be different on this camera was the position of the ZOOM control, possibly to have been controlled by your thumb and not finger.

Is as advertised

none that I can think of

Small, compact and easy to use

Poor image quality in low light situations

Compact and capable

Battery not great

image quality, ease of use, good size, reasonable price compared to market