Digital Trends

They may only be small numbers now because they cost so much but high-def camcorders are definitely the future of home video. Panasonic is helping out by lowering the cost of entry to below $1,000--$899 USD to be exact for the new HDC-SX5 that’s due any week now. And it’s a rather unique AVCHD camcorder since it records at a full 1920 x 1080i—the upper limit of the format—compared to the usual 1440 x 1080i of models we’ve review before such as the Sony HDR-CX7  and Panasonic’s HDC-SD1 . Now AVCHD matches HDV, the tape-based format whose quality we like so much —at least on paper. We’ll get into this as we dig deeper into the innards of this camcorder. The new 3-CCD HDR-SX5 is a “hybrid” in that it records HD to SD memory cards or 3-inch blank DVDs. How this ugly duckling performed was the $900 question as we waited for the battery to charge up…