![]() It's nice to have the choice between hard drive and SD card recording quality, but, ultimately, you'll get better quality out of other camcorders at this kind of price range, making the SDR-H101 a camcorder best picked up as a budget special. While the SD80 does cost more, the price difference isn't that immense between the two models at RRP, and yet the overall video capture quality is. As we tested this concurrently with the SD80, we were able to compare shot quality quite closely. ![]() Our largest gripe with it is really a pricing one. The SDR-H101 is a fair camcorder, but it's not a great one. You could get better results capturing still frames from much of the video shot on the SDR-H101. With an effective 0.4-megapixel lens, the SDR-H101's still image-capture quality was unsurprisingly uninspiring. Overall, this is very much a camcorder that delivers passable quality rather than anything that we could call exceptional. It's nothing that we haven't seen from similarly priced camcorders, however. In iA mode, results were mostly solid, although we noticed that the SDR-H101 had distinct problems with lighting correction, not just for using the front LED but also when panning across landscape scenes with variable lighting. It's very much a matter of personal taste as to whether you prefer a touchscreen or joystick control, but we found that the SDR-101's joystick did a good job of menu navigation. In ergonomic terms, the SDR-H101 was a pleasure to use it felt comfortable in the hand, and the essential shooting controls were easy to grasp. The one big difference here is that the SDR-H101 has a dedicated button for the front light, making it a lot easier to manage. The SDR-H80 camcorder offers a function that simplifies the process of copying recordings from the Memory Card or hard disk drive to a DVD. with a 32GB SDHC, Memory Card recording time can be as much as 26 hours. This is not a very stunning an option for the more professionally minded crowd, but this is very much an entry-level camcorder, backed up by the same "iA" (Intelligent Auto) shooting mode being the default as we tested on the SD80. The SDR-H80 camcorder can hold up to 54 hours of recording in LP Mode when the built-in hard disk drive is used. The sensor underlying the SDR-H101's f/1.9 33mm lens is a 1/8-inch CCD with a 0.8-megapixel sensor, 0.41-megapixel effective. Those wishing to eke out more video recording time can drop that bit rate to 5Mbps or 2.5Mbps, respectively, in SP and LP modes. That can be a double-edged sword many low-end "HD" camcorders do a ham-fisted job of high definition anyway, but the SDR-H101 will top out at a 720x576 10Mbps H.264 video capture in XP mode. With many camcorders - even at the entry level - starting to adopt high-definition recording as standard, it's rather surprising to discover that the SDR-H101 doesn't manage it. Where many consumer camcorders (including a lot of Panasonic's own range) opt for a touchscreen, the SDR-H101 opts instead for a simple small joystick control on the side of the camcorder's 2.7-inch LCD screen.
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