Panasonic AG-HMC150
I shoot weddings and I have used The HMC150, the Canon AH1.
From the beginning let me first tell you where my opinion is coming from - price tag: $3500
First off, neither of these cameras are brilliant in low light. They have 1/3 imagers. I don't care if they are made of gold and there are ten of them.
1/3 imagers are too small to gather enough light, even if you attached the Hubbell telescope to them.
To put such tiny sensors in a $3500 is poor, cheap engineering especially when SLR have larger sensors, shoot HD and don't cost this much.
Who are these camera angled at?
Videographers and indie filmmakers.
As a videographer what are you most concerned with - Low light.
Why? Because you cannot control lights at weddings at parties, etc. So your camera has to be able to handle it.
As an Indie filmmaker what are you most concerned with - The ability to look like film. It does, with 24p and film gamma, it's about all you need. But you are paying a premium. But for me, equally important to film look as 24fps is lens choice. Here you get none. While 24fps is what is ingrained in the everyone's consciousness as what film should look like, they also don't realize that shallow depth of field and variety of lenses is too. With these camcorders you get no choice, a 13x zoom with extremely wide depth of field at most every focal distance, because it's a zoom and because the imagers are tiny.
Good news The AG-HMC150 can handle most lighting situations.
Bad news - AVCHD codec, is noisy in even bright sunlight afternoons. The image is made of blotch.
Measuring image integrity by zoom factor - at 100% AVCHD compression is clearly visible. 200% the image is a swarming, infected mess.
Although the Panny can holdup in low light. I shot in a dark club and there was still something to see.
It has a very weird auto iris mode, that brings in more light, even when you do exact settings in manual.
Don't know if there is a magic switch, didn't have it long enough to work everything out.
The Canon uses HDV and instead of compression codec noise, you get digital noise; unpleasant grain (not like film), and washed out video at 100%. At 200% it's like looking at a digital still from a 10 year old point and shoot. And trust me, once an image is washed out and grainy, there is very little you can do (Some gamma correction will bring the shadows back to life, but that noise is there to stay. And the drop down to SD doesn't do it any favors.
Bottom line the Canon sucks in low light, especially in anything other than auto mode. I shot in a low light room and the image was garbage. Despite some settings tweaking, which leads me to Canon's second biggest problem and a problem with these camcorders in general.
The LCD and the Viewfinder are too small to see how your image is holding up. Everything looked fabulous on the Canon's 2.7 LCD...and then when you get it back to edit. Noise city. So you can only use the LCD for just basic image checking.
The HMC150 has a 3.5 LCD, but the brilliant engineers made it a 4:3 ratio! You have black matting in the image! The camera can only shoot 16x9 and they put a 4x3 LCD on it...so in the end you only get about 2.7" of real estate and you see as much as on the Canon, unless you are in focus assist mode which zooms in and uses the whole LCD.
So you have to know your settings and be shutter/iris paranoid, hoping for the best image. What you see is not what you get, you have to know what you want, like with film and set the camera accordingly, knowing which settings will get you want in the END, not what you are looking at through the camera.
The HMC150 definitely benefits from the higher rez. The Canon is 1440x1080. You can see the difference.
The Canon is more professionally built. Both plastic, but the canon feels more professional, and weirdly the HMC feels like a Tonka Toy, hard textured plastic, but like a light and chunky toy. I can hear the optical stabilizer clunking around in it. The Canon aesthetically looks more professional.
Audio on the Canon is better, it has much better limiter, I don't even think the HMC's is useful, but if you plug one xlr mic into the Canon...the onboard becomes unusable. HMC lets you assign channels for the onboard. Bad news is the onboard mic on both sucks, the Canon sounds better because the HDV format has higher rez than the compressed AVCHD codec.
The HMC and it's tapeless/AVCHD codec does not save much time, the transcoding takes almost as long if not longer than real time (HDV tape) and sometimes there are errors, especially transferring from camera, the footage speeds up, the audio remains constant and you have shorter clips. Happened constantly. My guess, USB and it's non constant data rate. Another cheap short cut by Panasonic. The Canon has a firewire, which speed is constant, and they need it for the HDV tapes.
The HMC wins out with higher rez, native progressive imagers, resulting in two true progressive modes, 24fps, the other mode/rez are wrapped in pulldowns. The Canon's 24f, etc modes are fake and you can tell. Everything is interlaced on the Canon. I hate interlaced.
This review isn't structured very well, but I don't have the energy, since I'm so unenthusiastic about both, so they're not worth more time. But I thought I would let potential buyers know, the ones who think these two cameras are the Holy Grail. They aren't, and they aren't worth the high price tag, they are worth $2000 not a penny more. But the problem is, what else is there?
I returned the HMC, and I didn't the Canon wasn't mine, but would have returned it too.
I'm going to try the Canon SLR route. The closest thing you can get to film without shooting it.
Annoyingly these two manufacturers and Sony...are all sticking it to us. Instead of advancing things, they are taking baby steps, giving us one desired function at a time for a price.
If Canon can put a full frame sensor in their 5d II and can give it 1920x1080 30fps shooting, why can't they put that sensor in a camcorder, with a SLR interchangeable lens mount, with XLR inputs?
Because they want to sell camcorders AND slr cameras.
These camcorders are just big consumer cams. They don't have enough image improvement to warrant $2500+ more in cost. You are paying for features, limited manual adjustments, not image upgrade.
But of course I didn't have it for very long, two weeks.
I just couldn't get over the price versus video quality, and workflow.
They don't justify the price, especially when I think we are very close to getting some real breakthroughs in HD imaging.
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