The Panasonic SDR-H200 is the company's top of the line standard definition HDD DV camcorder. If you're judging a camcorder on video quality and manual control options alone, the SDR-H200 is at the top of the amateur level HDD units out there. Yet it's far from perfect, and has some design quirks that left us baffled.

The excellent image quality stems from the SDR-H200's three 1/6-inch CCDs, each with a gross pixel count of 800,000. The DV camcorder produces stunning images in good lighting, with excellent sharpness and well-saturated colors. Compared to the camcorder's video quality in good lighting, though, the SDR-H200's low lighting performance failed to impress us nearly as much. Colors become washed out, and the level of video noise increases substantially. Unfortunately, the unit lacks an accessory shoe, and there's no option of adding a video light to increase illumination.

The Panasonic SDR-H200 boasts a 30GB hard disk drive along with a SDHC memory card slot. The HDD can hold more than seven hours of the highest quality video or 27 hours at the lowest quality setting; slip a 4GB SD memory card into the slot and you can store another 24 minutes. The SDR-H200 doubles as a hybrid digital stills camera, capturing your photos to either memory card or the hard disk drive at a maximum resolution of 2,048x1,512 pixels. The unit even comes included with a 512 MB SD card.

As well as a highly functional auto mode, the SDR-H200 offers an array of manual controls, more than any of the competing HDD camcorders on the market. These include controls for focus, shutter speed, aperture, gain and white balance. Adjustments are made using the rear-mounted joystick control. While the menu is crammed with a huge number of options, navigation is straightforward enough--Novice users shouldn't be put off.

The 10x optical zoom function on this DV camcorder is augmented by Panasonic's excellent optical image stabilization system, keeping the images rock solid during handheld shooting. When it comes to transferring footage from the hard disk drive to a home computer for editing, however, the SDR-H200 presents some awkwardness. Both the USB and AC jacks are situated behind the battery pack so there's no way of exporting your videos on the go without removing the battery and connecting the power adapter. This also means that you can't recharge the battery while transferring footage to a PC, or switch from battery power to AC power while you're shooting without having to shut off the camcorder and remove the battery first.

Despite some design flaws and disappointing low light performance, the Panasonic SDR-H200 is a quality hard disk drive DV camcorder that will appeal to point-and-shooters looking to experience greater manual control over their home video recordings.

Pros: Excellent image quality in good lighting, great handling, impressive OIS
Cons: Disappointing low light performance, awkward placement of connections

Warranty
1 year parts and labor