Panasonic SDR-S10 review

Use the S10 in Auto mode and you'll be forgiven for thinking it's an auto-everything camera aimed at unskilled extreme sports dudes: you don't even have access to scene modes. Flip into manual mode, though, and it's a different story. Here, you can manually adjust the iris, shutter speed and white balance, and even manually focus (albeit rather ineffectually as there are no magnification aids).

Video recording is possible in three settings, the highest quality of which (XP) fits around half an hour of footage onto the 2GB card supplied. Leave it in this mode unless you're really running short of space, as the S10's 800K CCD sensor is about as far from high definition as you can buy these days. You also get easy backlight compensation and Soft Skin modes, plus a Colour Night View setting in place of any video light or photo flash.

Performance
You might want to film in traditional 4:3 format (rather than 16:9 widescreen), to eke a few more pixels from the solitary, low-res sensor. Even then, fine detail is poorly captured, with leaves and bricks smearing into one another. Sharpness is sensibly managed, though, so faces and larger subjects look reasonably natural, if occasionally too smooth and uniform.

On the plus side, bright, primary colours are very well rendered and exposure is bright and lively. Skin tones are perhaps too subtle to be accurate, and fade into grey tones as light levels drop. The omission of even a basic LED video light is painfully felt -- this is not a camcorder for parties or night-time shooting. Dark conditions reduce footage to a mass of dreary noise. The Colour Night View mode does indeed rescue some colours, but only at the expense of such a slow shutter speed that your subjects will have to stand rock-steady, as in Victorian snapshots, to avoid blurring.

Still photos are fine, but with only a 0.3-megapixel resolution (640x480 pixels) to play with, you'll be better off snapping away on a modern camera phone than switching into the S10's simple photo mode.

Conclusion
While size isn't everything, combine the S10's microscopic waistline with its ultra-tough casing and useful manual controls and you've got a truly unique camcorder.

Image quality is disappointing, especially in low light, but for outdoor movies when hiking, biking, sailing and skiing -- or simply lounging on the beach -- there isn't much to rival it. However, that might change later this year with the launch of Sanyo's fully submersible Xacti VPC-E1 pistol-corder, which boasts a smaller 5x zoom but decent 6-megapixel stills.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield