Panasonic SDR S150 flash media camcorder

This is an outstanding camcorder. If you hate lugging around that big camcorder this is for you. Very compact and almost pocket sized. In fact if you wear cargo shorts or pants, you can carry it around comfortably in your pocket. Video quality is very good and it does record in 16:9 widescreen. Quality is about on par with a Hi8 digital if not better.

Panasonic states it takes a 4gb max card but I'm running an $50 8gb Transcend SDHC card no problem from Newegg.com. With the 8gb card the S150 shows it will take 2 hours of video. Some state that the camera will only use 4gb of the card but I have gone over 5gb with videos and photos in one trip. See camcorderreviews.com for details on selecting cards.
I think it's limitations are single video files over 4gb but have never tested this. If you don't plan on videoing more than 2 hours straight from record to stop this is ok. Remember I cannot confirm this.

The camera saves your videos as .MOD files which are just MPEG-2 movies with renamed extensions. For Windows, you Don't have to manually rename the files, Just tell Windows to open the .MOD files in Media Player or whatever you use.
No more capture cards or slow dubbing to tape. Every time you click record and then stop, it creates a file. Just USB the camera to your computer, it pops up as a Flash drive, drag your vids off the camera and burn to DVD using a DVD editor like ULead DVD Studio or similar. Cool thing is you can tell your DVD editor to create chapters for every file. So no more detailed tape cutting and splicing of chapters if you keep a mind on when you record and stop with the camera.

It's not Macintosh friendly but OSX does recognize the camera as a USB drive. iDVD and Quicktime do not like MPEG-2 video but the free VLC player does. For iDVD you need to buy an extra plug-in.

Battery life is good IF you try not to preview the movies all the time and leave the LCD in power save mode. Otherwise it should last for about 1 1/2 hours of straight recording. It has an instant on feature for super quick shots. You can leave the switch on and close the LCD, it shuts off. Flip the LCD open when you have a shot and it powers up an about a second! This isn't a sleep mode that just uses less power, you are just telling the camera to power on using the LCD. Lithium battery charges in about 1 hour from a full drain cycle.

Photos are good if there is a lot of light but forget darker areas. Very slow auto-focus but what do you expect? It's a camcorder. Cool thing is it has a manual mode with alot of SLR features like manual shutter speeds, white balance and the like. You can force the camera to take better dark shots if you know what you are doing with the shutter speeds and have a steady hand. The automatic processing just never does it right.

Zoom in Camcorder mode is insane. 10x optical zoom is good. If you flip to digital zoom goes to 700x. Of course we never use digital zoom because of quality degradation but its fun to play with and makes a good set of binoculars. I managed to capture a friend at a baseball stadium in the crowd 100 yards away. Also good if you see a UFO or Bigfoot in the distance.

The camera's automatic lense cover comes off and you can add standard filters.

My wife and I go on many vacations and take only this camera. Its size is really fantastic. I cannot wait to see what the future brings for flash media camcorders!