The aforementioned sharpening filter adds mild halo's around people and objects, this is only really noticeable if you wear black or a dark outfit and are shot against bright sunny backgrounds or snow, i consider this a serious flaw and i wish i had bought a JVC Everio instead, now reviews will tell you the JVC Everio is not as detailed as the Panasonic, i believe thats not true, i think the reviewers are not taking into account the perceived detail that edge enhancement can give to an image, take away the edge sharpening, and the issues which come from applying it, and the JVC Everio camcorder range or indeed any of the Canon range of camcorders will be just as detailed.

One of the big plus points for me is that this camcorder shoots 1920×1080 at 50fps/progressive at 28mbp/s, you don't get any of the issues associated with interlaced video, i'm also pleased to see that Sony Vegas 11 now comes with the ability to edit footage shot in this mode, i imagine more editing software will also be updated to reflect the fact that many camcorder brands now have a 50/60p mode and the quality of the image is improving because of this.

I bought Samsung and Sandisk 16 gigabyte class 6 SDHC cards to use with this camcorder, i recommend class six as the minimum standard, 16GB gets you around 1H and 20 minutes of footage at the very highest setting and around 2 hours of footage if using the 17mbp/s 25fps setting, you can of course shoot more at even lower settings but that defeats the purpose of owning an HD camcorder since the lower settings will have image artifacts, even the 17mbp/s setting is not immune to image artifacts but that depends on what you shoot and whether its a relatively still image with neutral colours or a moving image with bold colours, i recommend always shooting at 28mbp/s and use something like Sony Vegas 11 to edit your footage. You can also use SDXC cards up to 64GB in size with this camcorder, prices on these cards are getting lower and lower, check out the Amazon link to the left for a card i use and recommend.

I used to own a Sony Hi8 camcorder which had a very good 30x zoom and 0 Lux night mode, you could get infrared black and white footage at upto 6 feet away from you and the zoom was fabulous, well this model only gives you a maximum zoom of 18x and low level light performance is very good at about 1 Lux with colour night view switched on, when using that mode the shutter speed defaults to 1/25 of a second but i find it shoots respectable footage in low light, the maximum shutter speed is 1/8000 of a second and this camcorder can shoot some pretty decent slow motion footage, useful for sports or fast moving objects, i will shoot some footage showing that and post it here at a later date.

This model comes with onscreen options via the 2.7 inch touchscreen for focus, white balance, shutter and iris and you can choose manual or auto focus, auto focus is fine most of the time and manual can sometimes be a bit of a chore due to the fact there is no focus ring on this model and its often hard to know for sure you have the best focus due to the small 2.7 inch screen, now that screen is useful and great to have but its not really suitable for quality control, thus you may shoot something and think its great and then get it home and watch it on the large screen and notice a few issues you missed when viewing the footage on the smaller screen. With the iris you can go from F16 to F1.5, and you get up to 18db of video gain available on top of a fully open aperture. Shutter and iris can be configured independently of one another. The camera also has a Zebra feature, no you don't need to visit the zoo to enable it, what the Zebra does is help you with the lighting, if the footage is overexposed you see Zebra stripes onscreen in the areas that need adjusting, simply change shutter speed or iris settings until the stripes disappear or perhaps you want overexposure, whatever the case may be this is a very useful feature on a camcorder.

The image sensor is 1/4.1-type MOS x 3 and the effective pixels are 2.53 megapixels x 3, 3MOS delivers better and more accurate colour reproduction or at least thats the theory, this camcorder uses a Leica Dicomar Lens and comes with a very good optical image stabilizer, you can simutaneously shoot video and still images, thats a nice feature although you may not need to use it, effective still images are 7.89 megapixels although interpolation brings this up to 14.2 megapixels, you get a flash which can be switched on or off, if you decide to shoot a still image in a room that is completely dark then enable the flash and it will capture the image as if the room was lit up, its very effective and works brilliantly, my only issue with the stills captured is the same issue i have with the video footage, edge sharpening, if you are careful with what you shoot then you may never notice this issue, just beware shooting anything dark against a light background, you may spot minor edge halo's if you do this, i thought the still image quality was very good for a camcorder, almost as good as some of the quality lower priced digital cameras but obviously no competition for higher priced cameras.

The battery supplied with the camcorder lasts about 1 hour and 40 minutes on a full charge, you can buy additional batteries which last much longer though, if shooting around the home or garden then i recommend plugging the camcorder into the mains and saving your precious battery life. It takes about two and a half hours to charge the battery to full capacity.

This model has Dolby Digital 2 channel stero sound, you can switch on a wind suppression noise feature within the operating menu but i personally do not think this works that well, strong winds will still be picked up, anyways if you are serious about shooting video footage you will replace the sound using a video editing suite, thus its not a big deal unless you must have the original sound recording and are extremely fussy about this. If sound is all important then hunt down a Panasonic HDC SD700 or SD900 model.

A quick word about the digital zoom, this can be 30x zoom to 700x zoom, you can use this to around 50x with some degradation in quality but i think that after that it is a poor man's telescope as you will get very grainy and pixellated poor quality video at the higher settings, digital zooms just do not work that well, perhaps one day but not right now. The telemacro mode is most impressive, very useful if you wish to film a closeup of a flower or an insect or perhaps a coin, maybe film someone's eye, there are lots of creative uses for macro mode.

This model is now superceded by the Panasonic HDC SD800, from what i gather the only improvements made are that the zoom is now 20x and perhaps a few minor improvements to the optical image stabilizer, i think its a shame panasonic felt the need to add some edge sharpening, if you read all the online reviews then you will know it has fooled many people into believing these panasonic camcorders are sharper than the competition, i would like to see an option to defeat the edge sharpening because even though i have the camcorder set at -2 it still is there, indeed even at -5 it is there. Its still a good camcorder but if you could bypass the edge sharpening i would rate it as an excellent camcorder.

Below is some footage i shot out of the house window, no reflections thanks to the B+W filter and this is timelapse mode, the image is slightly over exposed, a limitation i had to live with due to the shooting conditions and the YouTube footage is heavily compressed and does not resemble the actual quality of the original shot video, its just a taster of what can be done with time lapse on a modern camcorder, oh a slight niggle i have with this camcorder is that it only allows you to shoot time lapse at 17mbp/s and you cannot use the 28mbp/s auto focus highest setting, i'll probably add to this post at a later date and shoot some more footage. It's worth mentioning that with YouTube or indeed Vimeo you are restricted in the quality you get, i may shoot at 28mbps or 17mbp/s but they will convert that footage to around 4 or 5mbp/s and thus something has to give and usually you get video artifacts because of the lower bitrate, these artifacts are not on the original shot video. You can watch this in what is YouTubes idea of high definition by clicking on the 360p and choosing upto 1080p.

LED is being touted as the future for home cinema projectors but laser may also find it's way into the home. There are speckle issues to be resolved with lasers when used for projection but hopefully they are working on that issue and will find a way to overcome it.

A new laser product has recently been released in America. The AAXA A1 Laser Pico Projector. The AAXA has 20 Lumens which isn't much but you get perfect focus on any surface. You also get a built in media player and a 2GB thumb drive and it has it's own USB slot. The resolution is 800×600 and it throws a maximum 50 inch image. You get 90 minutes on a charge. This projector is not cheap for what is on offer with the AAXA costing $599.

On a more exciting note Sony have announced a laser projector intended for either home cinema viewing or theatrcal cinema viewing. Prices are as yet unknown but it won't be cheap. Sony announced last week the development of a new laser light source module suitable for cinema projection consisting of three lasers for red, green and blue. The lasers have a power output of 10W for Red, 6W for green and 5W for blue.

The developed module can be used for a range of projectors with 1000 Lumens to 10,000 Lumens. This makes it suitable for home cinema and digital theatrical cinema screenings. Multiple modules can be stacked together which means higher brightness, lower power consumption which will be around 110 Watts at 5000 Lumens, better contrast and colours, increased life of over 10,000 hours and miniaturization of the optical prism.

The colours on laser projectors will be better than anything seen to date and focus will never be a problem again. Contrast and brightness will be perfect for home cinema standards. Sony is expected to introduce these new projectors during the latter half of 2010.

JVC have also announced an 8K resolution 3D compatible Laser projector. Hopefully the future of the projector is either LED or laser and i for one hope the bulb is eventually a thing of the past. The only stumbling block at the moment is the price of this new technology although it has to be said lasers have been under development for projectors for well over five years but it finally looks like products will hit the market.

Speckling is also an issue that needs to be overcome with laser projectors. Speckling is an issue with light bouncing back onto the laser beam and this causes the speckling issues which can make it seem like there is dots on the image. It's possible in the future that LED could combine with laser and make the ultimate viewing experience but for now the technology is still in it's infancy and faces a tough battle to grab some market share.

Many of the smaller channels will have huge amounts of blocking going on in the backgrounds. In my region we are now all digital and cannot pick up terrestrial broadcasts anymore and i recall how the advertisements would originally talk about the superior image quality that digital would bring, now they concentrate on telling us how we will get more choice and more channels because they know the broadcasts are actually inferior to a well installed terrestrial analogue image.

Indeed even sound quality is worse than the old analogue broadcasts which gave us NICAM at over 750kbp/s.  Now we get digital compressed sound and usually under 128kbp/s. 

Thankfully the future of broadcasting is HD and there is now an affordable option for those who have been waiting for prices to fall. I bought the Bush HD Freesat box around a month ago and there are some issues with it but it performs very well with high definition images. The issues with the box are that it appears to not have a heatsink inside and it gets hot during the day so i would personally recommend it's switched off on warm days and perhaps on warm nights a small fan can blow air at the unit and make sure the air vents are never blocked.

The box sometimes loses sound when flicking through channels, it's an intermittment problem and does not happen that often but when it does i find the unit only restores sound by unplugging and plugging back in. Since i did a recent firmware update this particular issue appears to have gone.

Standard definition images appear slightly softer when you have chosen 1080i but that's not a deal breaker since many of the SD channels look so bad anyway.

At the moment you can get Channel 4, BBC and BBC 1, STV, NHK World and ITV 1 transmitting in high definition but Channel 5 have signalled their intent to transmit free to air HD programming. I hope this will happen sometime during 2012.

BBC sports broadcasts look good in HD and they are transmitting more films on their HD channels although their low bitrate causes some image issues.  Hopefully the BBC will listen to customer complaints and up their bitrate, really we need around 16 to 18mbp/s for really good quality.

I actually sent a complaint to the BBC recently asking that they raise their bitrate back to previous levels and that they start transmitting all their films in HD.  Becoming Jane was the first film i had seen transmitted on the channel since the box was bought. I hope they up bitrates, quality over quantity is my motto.

The Bush Freesat HD box is ugly but it performs reasonably well and i think it's worth it if you want HD broadcasts now and don't want to pay Sky ridiculous money, Sky also cram in lots of HD channels on their service and use too low a bitrate, although thats just my opinion.

The Bush box has the following features below and if you already have a dish it's easy to get it going and can be bought for around £69.99 from Argos.

LED stands for light emitting diode and is being used more and more for lighting purposes. The build quality looks superb and the projector weighs in at 22.4KG.

Runco says the size could shrink by 25% but for now the size helps with heat dissipation and noise control as this is a very quiet projector. Brightness for this new projector is rated at 800 Ansi Lumens.  When calibrated to home theater standards you will get around 450 lumens which is good enough in a light controlled room for a screen size of around 120 inches and this should get you around 13 foot lamberts of light output on a 1.3 gain screen after professional calibration. There are cheaper bulb based projectors out there that will achieve over 600 real world lumens output with a new bulb but within 200 hours the bulb dims and they achieve much less. The LED Runco projectors do not lose light output and thus are perfect for those who have a light controlled room and a screen size of up to 120 inches.

LED projectors are capable of achieving perfect colour to meet the REC 709 blu ray standard. The colour is where LED really shines as we will be able to get as close to perfection as possible after careful calibration and an ISF professional calibration is recommended.  For those with 2.35:1 screens you can buy an anamorphic lens and maximise the quality from scope movies. Partner with an Oppo Blu Ray player and subtitles can be easily moved to anywhere on the screen thus it's the perfect scope set up for those who can afford it.

This projector is not really in the affordable range just yet but for those who have the money and want the convenience that LED brings then it's a sound investment and it's likely that within the next five years the technology should drop in price and lamps will become a thing of the past.

Runco also have an impressive 3D projector using LED technology, their D-73 projector is different to other manufacturers in that it uses passive glasses and twin projection lenses, of course its very expensive and a silver screen is required but for those wanting less crosstalk ( ghosting ) it may be a good buy if you should decide a projector comes before buying your Ferrari.