Panasonic HDC-SD90 review

Panasonic’s HDC-SD90 mid-range HD camcorder replaces last year’s Best-Buy-winning Panasonic HDC-SD60. The camcorder feels tiny – it’s the height of a can of Coke but skinny as a Red Bull. The SD90 records on SD cards only, but you can fit up to a 64GB SDXC card; though that will set you back £125, and so we’d recommend just carrying around a bunch of £15 16GB SDHC cards, which still have room for one hour and twenty minutes of video at the camcorder’s highest-quality settings.

The SD90 weighs just 285g with the battery fitted, and is comfortable to hold – the padded strap is easy on the back of your hand and the carbon-fibre-effect side panel is pleasantly grippy. Unlike its predecessor, the SD60, there are no hardware controls under the display – instead everything is done with the touchscreen. The menu system is easy to use, and there’s full manual control over shutter and aperture, so you can play with the balance between motion blur and exposure if desired. When using manual focus, it’s tricky to tell on the LCD display when everything is sharp. Thankfully, the SD90 helps you out by highlighting in-focus parts of the frame in blue.

The SD90’s optics also differ. Instead of a 35mm-equivalent minimum focal length of 35.7mm, it has a wider-angle 28mm – better for capturing vistas. The trade-off is a lower 729mm maximum focal length. After this you move into digital zoom, which can make your video an over-compressed mess. However, like the SD60, the SD90 has what Panasonic calls Intelligent Zoom. This uses a set of clever algorithms to compensate for the information lost when you crop into an image digitally. We found it worked fairly well. When zooming into an object to the camcorder’s maximum 40x range (optical + digital) and comparing it to the same scene shot with optical zoom only, the Intelligent Zoom footage had more noise and compression but was significantly better than we were expecting at such a high level of digital zoom.

Using the maximum zoom also showed off the SD90’s hybrid optical and digital image stabilisation. Even when shooting handheld film at 40x zoom, footage was almost completely steady. The camcorder sometimes failed to differentiate between deliberate and accidental movement, so would move rapidly away from our target, but this only happened occasionally. We also tested the camcorder on a vibrating platform, and hardly any of the shaking motion translated into our footage.

We were generally very impressed with the SD90’s video. Outdoor footage shot at both 1080i and 1080p was sharp and clear with accurate colours and very little noise – watching the video back on a monitor made us feel like we were walking around the streets outside our office. The camcorder struggled occasionally with exposure when we were filming from a rooftop under a sunlit sky, though. It coped well under office lighting, again showing little noise. We were surprised by the camcorder’s audio quality – the SD90 cut out the whir of the office air conditioning almost entirely, and voices had a rounded quality with little tininess.

Like most budget HD camcorders, the SD90 struggles in very low light levels. Although it managed to amplify light levels, there was little detail and plenty of noise. Its Colour Night View mode simply ruined the frame rate without doing much for the picture.

Panasonic has extended compatibility with its 3D adaptor across the whole range of HD camcorders this year. The VW-CLT1 adaptor does produce a fairly appreciable 3D effect, though your choice of shots is paramount – don’t expect Avatar like effects every time you pick up your camcorder. It’s still ludicrously bulky too, and pricey at around £250.

Panasonic’s HDC-SD90 is an easy-to-use and compact camcorder with an impressive zoom and image stabilisation, and generally excellent video quality in daylight and under moderate indoor lighting. We feel it’s worth the premium over Canon’s £300 HF R206 and Panasonic’s £350 HDC-SD80, so it wins a Best Buy award.