Panasonic VDRM50 DVD Camcorder

Rating:
Summary: Better off with tape
Review: Great idea but in practice this camera doesn't live up to expectations. The DVA-RAM re-recordable media is fairly esoteric, expensive and not compatible with most DVD readers. The other recoding media; DVD-R, has a hitch - after you record your 30 minutes of video, the disc needs to be "finalized" before it can be replayed in a DVD player. This takes at least 7minutes. You can't use the camera during this time and it must be plugged into its AC adapter. If "finalization" fails, you've lost all of your video on that DVD and it can't be recovered. Just happened to me so I thought I'd share the experience with others. At present, miniDV tape seems like a safer and more reliable option. This particular camera would only be useful to people who already own a device that can read 8cm DVD-RAM discs and copy them to other media.

Rating:
Summary: VERY DISAPPOINTED
Review: I bought this as a gift to my husband before he was deployed to iraq so that we could take dvd's of the children for him to watch. The manual is useless. It is very vague and difficult to follow in most areas. Using the camcorder was easy but when we went to use it with the PC we had all kinds of trouble. The usb cable is really nonfunctional. Panasonic reccomends that you back up your discs to pc...we couldnt even get the hardware to work right on our pc (the tower is brand new) and after calling tech support for help..well..he gave up too and we lost all of the video in the process. (so my husband went to Iraq with just pictures and a major let down.)Then we couldnt uninstall the hardware that was installed improperly and tech support could not help. I am so disappointed with this product that I am returning it to the store where i bought it and trying a different brand.
In short..if your not mechanically/or computer inclined this product will be difficult to use and the directions even harder to follow. And dont dvd record anything you want to keep on this product. It has a problem with erasing or locking you out so you cant get to the images and those precious moments are lost.....

Rating:
Summary: Works great for me
Review: I've had this camera for a few weeks now and have filmed over 10 hours without any problem. I film a lot of kid's sports (football, sailing, etc.) and the picture quality is excellent. I went with the Panasonic over the Sony because of the 18x optical zoom and I just don't think that the Sony name is not what it used to be. The last two Sony products I've bought had problems (computer is a piece of junk and the camcorder's viewfinder stopped working after a year).

If you are going to buy a DVD camcorder, I would recommend using a DVD drive to transfer video to your computer. It's simple and fast. I bought a LG burner and it works great. Editing software programs are a different story but this is a problem with and digital camcorder you buy.

Panasonic's technical support is definately not the greatest but neither is Sony. In conclusion, I'm very happy with this camera and love the DVD concept. I gave the camera 4 stars because of the lack of support from Panasonic and the included software is useless and the instructions are unclear. The software that came with the DVD burner is better but not perfect. At least I could edit and produce a video with music.

As far as DVD players, even if you buy a Sony, not all players support DVD rw, so you have to do your homework no matter what you buy.