Although this is a mass-market camcorder, it's great to see manual features on board. You can adjust the iris and shutter speed, boost backlight and even focus manually, although the 123K-pixel screen isn't really sharp enough to see what you're doing. There are lots of scene modes, including a surprisingly competent Colour Night View mode for low light shooting. The LED light helps in the dark, too.
Of course, the H250 can also capture still pictures. In fact, you could fit over 400,000 basic quality snaps on the hard drive, although with that much space available you may as well stick to full-res (3-megapixel) photos.
The H250 will be more resistant to bumps and shocks than clunky DVD burners, although Panasonic has sensibly integrated a drop detect function and buffer memory to preserve your footage (if not the camcorder itself) in the event that the worst should happen.
Performance
As there's so much storage, you'd be crazy to film at anything other than maximum quality. But even then, straight lines show jagged edges and the finest detail is smeared -- this is a long way from high definition. Colours are strong and whites are crisp and clean, with the excellent Leica lens keeping distortion and colour fringing firmly in check. Digital gimmicks like the Soft Skin mode aren't really necessary -- faces look fresh, rosy and soft enough anyway.
Indoor and night shooting show large quantities of dot crawl and video noise, even in low light modes. The LED light helps somewhat, but its range is limited. Still photos are colourful but packed with noise and blurred edges -- about as good as the better 2-megapixel and 3-megapixel camera phones, but way behind dedicated cameras.
While the type of video recorded to hard drive and SD card is identical, that's not the case for audio. The hard drive captures stereo sound in Dolby Digital format, while the memory card makes do with MPEG-1 audio. The difference isn't really audible with the on-board mic but stick with the hard drive if you're using an external microphone.
In our tests, the supplied battery gave a continuous recording time for top-quality footage to the hard drive of 120 minutes. Charging time is around 2.5 hours.
Conclusion
Panasonic's first hard disk camcorder is a great first effort. It's taken all the best elements from its tape models and transferred them successfully, although there are a few minor things we wish hadn't made the transition.
Unfortunately for Panasonic, standard-definition shooters are starting to look endangered as we enter the hi-def age, with products like Sony's Handycam HDR-SR1 around. Although this smart, sexy model is a great introduction to digital movie-making, its shelf-life appears dangerously short.
Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield
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