Panasonic HDC-TM300 review

Under your right thumb lies a traditional mode dial for choosing among power, video and still recording, and playback. Above the LCD on the body are the intelligent auto and 3-second pre-record buttons. On the LCD's bezel are zoom and record controls, a delete button, and 'quick menu' and menu buttons. Through the quick menu you can alter video quality, time lapse, picture size, on-screen display options, LCD brightness and guidelines. Via the menu button, you can select options such as where to record (built-in memory or SD card), choose from a handful of scene modes, 'digital cinema' (24p) mode, mic options (surround, zoom or focus; bass settings; and levels), and display options like 'zebra' and 'histogram'.

To the left of the lens are two buttons for invoking manual controls. Pressing the manual focus button switches the lens ring's operation between zooming and focusing. The function button brings up three options on the touchscreen: white balance, shutter and iris.

Primary operation occurs through the touchscreen menus, which pop up from a small icon in the lower-left corner. In auto mode, there's spot auto exposure and autofocus, backlight compensation, intelligent contrast, fade, soft skin mode, telemacro, and 'magicpix' night mode. In manual mode, you select via a scrolling menu on the left.

The TM300's accessory shoe is on the side rather than the top, where it's close to the mic input and out of the way of your grip

White balance offers the typical options, and shutter speed and iris are as broad and flexible as you'll get on an entry-level pro model. For instance, the iris opens as wide as 18dB in 3dB increments and closes to f16 in half stops. Although the shutter speeds start at a rather high 1/60 sec (in auto modes they'll drop lower, and 24p mode drops to 1/48 sec), they go as high as 1/8,000 sec.

At 69mm (2.7 inches), the LCD is a typical size for this class of camcorder. Overall, it's fairly good but it's not very effective as a touchscreen. There's visible feedback when you press one of the virtual buttons -- it turns yellow -- which helps when you're frustrated and pressing them repeatedly, attempting to get them to register your touch. We found the system in the HS100 and SD100 awkward, but at least you could use it with the EVF. Since this model uses a touchscreen, you can't change any of the manual settings while using it, which is a major drawback.

Performance
The TM300 performs relatively well and boots quickly from a cold start. The EVF, while coarse and not particularly colour accurate, is far better than nothing, which is what you get on most competitors. The zoom feels relatively precise and easy to control, and the camcorder focuses reasonably quickly in all but the lowest light. The audio sounds slightly thin, but it's acceptable. And Panasonic's optical stabilisation works solidly out to the end of the zoom range.

Video quality is quite good, showing none of the artefacts that plague the older models. Video looks sharp, although slightly softer than that of competing models from Canon and Sony. Colour and exposure live up to what you'd expect for a camcorder in this price range. Low-light video looks rather soft, although not nearly as soft as we've seen in previous models, and remains quite noise-free. While the stills look quite good zoomed out and printed as large as 11 inches by 16 inches, you can see all the interpolation artefacts when viewed at 100 per cent on screen. Although Panasonic claims a 10.6-megapixel resolution, the real resolution is only as high as any individual sensor.

Conclusion
The Panasonic HDC-TM300's annoying touchscreen interface holds back a solid prosumer HD camcorder that otherwise effectively competes with models like the Canon Legria HF S10. Between the TM300 and HS300, we favour the TM300 -- it's cheaper and most people don't really need the overwhelming storage capacity on the HS300's hard drive.

Additional editing by Charles Kloet