Product Description

The Panasonic HDC-S20 is an easy-to-use, full High Definition digital camcorder. The SD20 records on both SD and SDHC Memory Cards.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10709 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Panasonic
• Model: HDC-SD20 black
• Released on: 2009-02-28
• Dimensions: .60 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Sometimes a scene is backlit or too dark, or it's difficult to get a good focus on the subject. Adjusting the settings every time is not only a hassle, it can be very tricky. That's where iA comes in.

This powerful function senses the shooting conditions and automatically makes the settings and activates functions that will deliver optimal results.

With both motion and still images, iA lets you forget about bothersome settings and makes it easy to capture beautiful, well-focused images.

AF/AE Tracking
Locks on a subject and tracks it. Touch the LCD screen to indicate the subject, such as a person or an animal, that you want to focus on, and let AF/AE Tracking do the rest.

The camera locks on the subject and follows it around, keeping it in sharp focus and properly exposed. It keeps tracking even if the subject turns to the side.

This advanced function makes it easy to get a continually clear, beautiful shot of the subject in the scene you care most about.

Face Detection
Face Detection Captures faces beautifully - even in dim or backlit scenes. it automatically senses the ambient lighting and adjusts the exposure accordingly, so faces are bright and easy to see.

The focus also prioritizes the faces, and skin tones are smoothed.

Faces in the center of the frame serve as the reference for adjustments, but the function can detect up to 15 faces in all.

Intelligent Scene Selector
The Intelligent Scene Selector function analyzes the shooting situation and automatically switches the camcorder to the Scene mode that will give you optimal results.

This mode is ideal for shooting wide landscapes and sweeping vistas, such as at the ocean or in the mountains. It balances the exposure over the entire frame to prevent brighter parts of the image, such as the sky, from being washed out or having blown highlights.

This mode captures faces beautifully. With Soft Skin mode, complexions are automatically enhanced to make faces attractive.

The camcorder automatically uses this mode for scenes with particularly strong contrast, such as when you're shooting a spotlit area on a darkened stage. It captures the well-lit subject perfectly and prevents washed-out areas.

In dim lighting, the camcorder automatically switches to a slower shutter speed so that images across the entire frame are bright and easy to see.

Intelligent Contrast Control
By detecting the intensity of the ambient light and adjusting the exposure accordingly, Intelligent Contrast Control prevents blown highlights and blocked shadows.

This helps render natural-looking, highly nuanced images with proper contrast.

Touch Screen Operation
Control settings are made by simply touching the LCD screen. Operation is intuitive and easy, and the large letters are easy to read. Shooting and viewing are simple and stress-free – even for beginners.

Advanced Optical Image Stabiliser
Advanced O.I.S. ensures beautiful shots even with high-power zooming.

Using the Advanced O.I.S technology, gyrosensors detect hand-shake and the lens unit shifts to continuously adjust the optical axis, so that videos are perfectly sharp and blur-free.

Just lean back and enjoy capturing videos in their full natural beauty for the most clear and amazingly beautiful videos - even when shooting long-distance zoom shots.

The known typical hand-shake effect is no longer a concern.

16x Optical Zoom
The SD20 features a 16x optical zoom. You can zoom close to catch dynamic shots of distant objects. And because the zoom is optical, there's limited image degradation.

Also, Panasonic's Advanced O.I.S. (Optical Image Stabilizer) helps prevent blurring – typically a big concern when shooting with a zoom.

This combination of optical zoom and Advanced O.I.S. gives you the ability to take fantastic zoom shots.

Highlight Playback
Select the days of the recordings you want to see, and this innovative function automatically selects the most exciting scenes, arranges them, and plays them, backed by music. It decides how exciting a scene is based on zooming, panning, and scene changes, and whether there are faces and cheers. This gives you a quick, easy way to view the most exciting scenes all together. It's a great way to look back over exciting memories that you have recorded.

 

Box Contains

AC Adaptor

AC Cable

DC Cable

Rechargeable Battery Pack

Video Component Cable

AV Cable

IR Remote

USB Cable

HD Writer AE 1.0

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Customer Reviews

Cannot find a design fault with this camera
I am unable to find the design fault described by one reviewer of this camera.I have tested twice using two different SD cards to battery levels below one minute. Each time the battery indicator flashed in red at 3 minutes. I continued to record until after I got the final warning to replace the battery - stopping and starting several times. I then viewed my files still using the same battery without any loss of data.

I can only assume that the reviewer has a faulty card or camera, or perhaps I'm just lucky. ;-)

Panasonic HDC-SD20 High Definition Flash Memory Camcorder with Intelligent Auto Mode & 16x Optical Zoom - Black

Would have been nice, if it was reliable
It is not a bad camera overall. It is small, intuitive, looks nice, and records in a pretty good quality. The touch screen works good too and enables some nice functions: you can point an object to track, focus on and set exposition for, and in playback you can easily pick a clip to play from the thumbnails table. No hard drive or tape means better reliability... in theory.

In practice unfortunately the camera has a serious design flaw. It tends to corrupt files if you record at low battery. The information provided by the camera says about approx. 4 minutes left, you shoot a clip, and then you see that there is a data error, which cannot be fixed due to low battery level. You recharge the battery, start the camera, it fixes the files, and... all your files taken on that date are gone!

The thing is that in AVCHD format raw video files are accompanied by a lot of other meta files. It seems that at low battery the camera cannot create proper meta files for the last clip. But that would be forgiveable. The real trouble is that the camera seems to be attempting to recreate all meta files for all clips taken on that day, and then you end up losing all your work.

Good thing is you ain't really loosing it, as the raw .mts files are still there. But you will not be able to play them on the camera, or use the included software to burn them on a BD or DVD. You'll need something like Corel VideoStudio x2 to manually edit each clip from the raw file. And that's slow and inconvenient, and requires a lot of research to learn about such possibility, in the first place.

The funny thing is that the problem could be easily fixed/remedied/eased in at least three ways:
1. The camera should not modify the meta files for previously saved clips. No matter what, these should be left alone (and safe) when a new one is being taken
2. The battery indicator should show a shorter time left, and shut off the cam when it has not enough juice to create all the accompanying files
3. A software to analyse the raw file, and recreate all the rest of AVCHD files to accompany it (sort of a recovery utility) should be provided

None is available though. And for that reason I would not buy this camera again, or recommend it to anybody else. It is really pointless to spend time and effort taking videos, depending on the results, and suddenly lose them all.

I mean, this camera just cannot be trusted, as it happens again and again. Overall I am very, very disappointed...

Panasonic HDC-SD20
I don't now what the last reviewer is rambling on about. This is a very desent camera for the price. The picture quality is great and is very easy to upload your videos to the web, youtube etc. Playback on HDTV is also great. The camera has a touch screen LCD display which is simple and easy to use and allows you to view and playback your videos. At the price you'd be hard pressed to find better.