Panasonic TM700

The HDC-TM700 is one of Panasonic's latest collection of camcorders, the first to film in 1080p50 and with a 35 mm wide-angle lens.

With today's stills cameras getting better and better at shooting HD video, many of us have been eagerly awaiting new developments like this on camcorders.  Will the TM700 help camcorders catch up?

Handling

On the outside, the TM700 has kept most of the controls that we saw last year.  It switches on automatically as soon as you open the screen, which also causes the lens to open up.  A wheel on the right allows you to flick through Video, Playback and Photo modes, with this last relying on an SD card.  The TM700 is less comfortable to film with than some of its competitors.  It does have a viewfinder, but it's too small to really get a good view.  Your other choice, the LCD screen which measures 3'' and has 230 000 pixels looks stingy next to the 3.5'', 920 000-pixel screens on the Canon HF S21 and Sony CX550.  It is touch-sensitive though and allows you to configure the various settings very easily.

Bizarrely, Panasonic has moved the accessory shoe to the side of the camcorder rather than its usual position on top.  It's a strange decision that means you have to use a special adaptor to connect a lamp or an external mic.


Nevertheless, Panasonic has faithfully maintained two elements which have allowed it to stand out from the competition for a long time.  The first is a ring for manual focus which turns freely, which is much better than the small dials used by Sony and Canon, especially for those of us with large fingers.  The second is a battery charger that's separate from the rest of the camcorder, meaning you can keep on shooting use one battery while you recharge another.  Panasonic is currently the only manufacturer to offer these two advantages on its camcorders.

Video Quality

This is where the TM700 really stands out.  In 1080i mode (17 Mbps), Panasonic easily beats the Sony CX550 and Canon HF S21, despite both of them recording at a higher bitrate of 24 Mbps.  The same is true even in difficult conditions, with the TM700 offering sensitivity in low light that's noticeably better than its rivals'.  This improvement is mostly down to the new f/1.5 Leica lens and the Crystal Engine Pro processor.  This video will give you a little insight into the quality, even if YouTube's encoding spoils the effect a little.


The TM700 is also the first AVCHD camcorder to shoot in 1080p: it really does shoot fifty 1920 x 1080-pixel frames per second with a progressive scan (1080p50).  You can activate this mode directly using a dedicated button on the camcorder, but the difference in quality between 1080i AVCHD and 1080p MPEG is so subtle as to go unnoticed.  Despite a bitrate of 28 Mbps, we struggled to see the difference with similar scenes shot in 1080i AVCHD, even when zoomed in.  That's rather disappointing as naturally enough, 1080p files are twice as big as 1080i ones.  The 1080p isn't entirely useless though, and retains two clear advantages.  Firstly, a framerate of 50 fps produces more fluid video if things are moving fast like they might do in a sports match.  Secondly, because it's progressive, you don't have to subsequently de-interlace the video before showing it off online or on your TV.

The other big new feature is the 35 mm wide-angle lens (in 24 x 36 mm equivalent) with a 12x zoom.  Although that won't be enough for some people, it represents a marked improvement on the maximum apertures of 43 and 50 mm that we've had to put up with until now.

Otherwise, the TM700 has everything you need.  It has a mic input and a headphone output for doing interviews, as well as a built-in 5.1 mic for producing surround sound.  32 GB of flash memory might not seem much, but it's enough to record 2 hours 40 minutes of 1080p video and 4 hours 10 minutes using 1080i.  If you need even more space, there's an SD card slot to expand the memory even further.