My Mini-Review and Impression of the Panasonic AV-100
by Tim Root, MD

I recently dropped by Circuit City and discovered they had a demo unit of Panasonic's new AV-100 camcorder. This remarkable little device doesn't use tapes, but captures video directly onto SD flash cards using the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video formats. The folk at Circuit City let me play with the unit ... since I happened to have an SD card on me, I went ahead and recorded a few clips to take home (see clips below).

I'm glad to see a tapeless device like this as I've always hated transferring video tapes to my hard-drive. Even with a blazing fast hard drive, I still run into problems with firewire. Here are my impressions of the Panasonic AV-100 device:

Size and Form Factor
Little ... this thing is small. Much smaller than Sony's MicroMV recorders. The LCD screen was bright, but rotated in a rather odd manner ... you can reverse the screen for taking self-portraits, but you can't lay the panel flat when this is reversed (like in the picture above). Weird. Also, playback of captured video did not occur full-screen, but appeared in a tiny little window in the middle of the screen. I don't like the top-mounted microphone placement, either ... but at least their won't be any motor noise.

Flash memory:
The device uses SD cards for storage ... hardly surprising since Panasonic is the major pusher of SD as a memory standard. I would have preferred Compact Flash cards, as they are much cheaper and come in larger formats (and also as micro-drives). Over the next few years I expect all video cameras will have internal hard-drives like an iPod mp3 player.

MPEG quality:
Unfortunately, the device uses MPEG compression to save video. While this format is fine for DVDs, it is not great for those who like to edit their videos ... MPEG compression loses a lot of quality with multiple edits. The MPEG2 video that I captured seems pretty good: not nearly DV-AVI quality, but better than Hi-8. I would avoid using MPEG4 settings as it is difficult to import MPEG4 into other editing or DVD-creation programs.

What's with the MPEG4 format anyway? Sure, it's small size is great for displaying and sharing videos ... but a highly compressed format like this sucks for raw-video capturing and editing.

Hopefully, the device will come with editing software to splice out clips without re-encoding the MPEG2 video. This may be an in-camera function, but I didn't get a chance to try it out.

Here are two video clips I captured. The first contains some panning and zooming, which should give you an idea of how well the MPEG2 compression looks. You'll notice some MPEG2 compression artifacts and some moiré patters on straight lines. The second clip is a close-up face shot to check the sound. These are the original captured files (about 10 megs each). Both files initially had a ".mod" extension ... which I have changed to ".mpg" so that media player will recognize it.

SD Card Compatibility:
I recorded the MPEG2 video at the highest setting onto a 256mb Sandisk SD card. The next day I tried recording video onto a "generic" Viking 256mg card, but the camcorder wouldn't let me record at the highest setting. I'm not sure why this occurred ... perhaps the camcorder can sense what brand of card I'm using?

Standard DVD-Video?
The device captures video at 704x480 resolution ... I'm not sure if this is standard DVD-compliant video (I usually encode my home videos to DVD's maximum 720x480 resolution) but I believe 704 can also be used. If I can create DVDs from the raw captures without reencoding the video, I will be very impressed. However, I think the highest data-rate setting may be a little too much for some DVD players.

Conclusion:
This seems like a nifty little device, and would make a decent secondary camcorder. The short filming-time doesn't seem like a huge deterrent to me ... most of my home videos are less than 4 minutes long, anyway. However, I'm not going to buy the thing ... it is a first generation device with a big expensive flash card that inflates the price. I'll wait a year or so until hard-drive based players arrive that capture into standard (higher-quality) DV-AVI video.

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