Digital Trends

Panasonic HDC-SX5

September 16th, 2007 | by David Elrich

Features Cont'd:

The left side has the flip-out 2.7-inch widescreen LCD monitor. When closed there are a few unobtrusive logos. Underneath the screen is a compartment for A/V, component and USB out; an SD card slot is right next to it (it’ll hold 8GB maximum). Once you pop open the LCD you’ll see a very good monitor that’s rated 300K pixels. Colors are very accurate colors and there’s little smearing. On the body is a switch to change between Auto, Manual and Focus along with keys for Disc Copy and Power LCD Extra to boost the brightness of the screen. The speaker is here too.

The rear is dominated by that battery I love so much. Disconnect it and you’ll find the HDMI out. This means you have to take off the battery to access it for playback and connect the DC-in which is located to the left. What were these guys thinking? Also here is the pull-out viewfinder with diopter control. Controls to the right of battery include the main mode dial with center joystick. This is nicely designed and split into two portions for standard def or high-definition recording. You can choose to record HD to either the card or disc while you can only do SD video on DVDs (a DL disc records 35 minutes of best-quality standard-def footage). There are playback options for either setting. The joystick has a nice feel and quickly moves you through the menus. They’re fairly intuitive and after checking out the supplied owner’s manual you’ll learn what the icons represent without too much difficulty.

There are also keys for Delete, Menu, disc eject and the record button. There is one control that’s new—called Pre-Rec for Pre Record. This is a cool feature. Just press the button and the camcorder will record three seconds of footage into a buffer. This way if something great happens and you were a little slow hitting the record button, you’ll capture some of the action. Another nice feature is the fact once you put the camcorder into record mode, it pops to life when you open the LCD or pull out the viewfinder.

The Made In Japan camcorder has a tripod mount on the bottom. The HDC-SX5 comes with a good kit including battery/charger, various cables including DC-in, A/V, USB and component video. It comes with a remote and a CD-ROM with HD Writer 2.0E software that lets you transfer footage to a computer, burn discs and perform basic editing chores. It also has a 168-page owner’s manual.

After loading a 4GB card and a DVD-R DL disc, it was time to take some videos and stills.