HD Camcorders on a Budget: Panasonic HDC-SD9

The Panasonic HDC-SD9 is a great HD camcorder with a sleek, compact design and a small price tag.

The Panasonic HDC-SD9

The HDC-SD9, from Panasonic, is an efficient HD camera with a sleek, compact design and a great price tag. Coming in at around $499 USD, it has a few quirks, but its still got a lot to love.

Technical Speciications

Digital Zoom: 700x

Max Shutter Speed: 1/8000 sec

2.1 megapixels

Optical Zoom: 10x

The Good

The HDC-SD9 is a flash based camcorder, which makes it pretty light. One of the things I liked about the design was the placement of the buttons; they were on the side of the camera body, inside the LCD screen. I liked this a lot because a lot of camcorders I've used have had some of the main buttons that I use a lot (like the zoom button, for instance) on the side of the LCD screen. This gets very annoying, because you have to prop the camera on one hand and press the tiny buttons inside the screen with another, and not only does that make your hand hurt, it makes the footage shaky as well.

The placement of the SD card slot is also very convenient, placed right underneath the battery. The colors were saturated when I filmed outside, which I kind of liked, but the footage came out a bit sharp.

The Bad

One thing that really got on my nerves was the fact that if you wanted to download footage from the camcorder to your computer, you have to take out the battery. This is because the port for the power supply is behind the battery; you have to remove the battery to get at it. And, like may HD camcorders, the camcorder needs to be plugged in, not on battery power, to download video. And, to tell you the truth, I'm not the best with putting in and taking out batteries, and I like to avoid it whenever possible, so this feature really annoyed me.

Another thing I hated about the SD9 is that you have to open the little LCD window to take out the battery. If you close the LCD screen, the camera goes into standby mode. If you take the battery out while it's in standby mode, you're stuck that way. I had to do a lot of button-pressing and camera-banging to get it out of standby mode once it got stuck.

The software that comes with the SD9 has a few bugs in it, so make sure you do an internet search to see if those bugs have been worked out.

The Bottom Line

The SD9 is a great little camera with a cute little price tag. It has a lightweight, convenient design that's easy on the eyes. I'd recommend this camera for those with a little more patience; the bugs in this camera, although there aren't many, might make you want to throw it out the window.