Panasonic HC-Z10000 review

Still, a lot of this can be forgiven once you start shooting. For 2D footage, the camera has the same sensor and max aperture (F1.5 at wide angle to F2.8 at telefocus) as well as focal length of 2.84 to 34.1mm (29.8 to 368.8mm, 35mm equivalent) as the company’s high-end consumer HC-X900. That’s no bad thing, as image quality is stunning.

Detail across the entire image, even into the far background is incredible, with the camera retaining every single bit of information without any compression artefacts. Colour reproduction is spot on, too, faithfully reproducing everything from the bright blue sky to the dark red-brick buildings in our test shots. Outside, the Z10000 gives you footage that’s superbly detailed and lifelike.

Detail throughout the image is impressive.

In full-auto mode the camera’s quick to respond and accurate. We noticed this moving from outside to inside, where the Z10000 correctly switched white balance and adjusted its iris and shutter speed to avoid under-exposing the frame. In dark situations, the fast F1.5 lens and three sensors really help out and we struggled to spot anything other than a small amount of noise in a dimly lit room. Noise gets more out of control when it’s very dark, but there’s still plenty of detail in the picture. Besides, when it gets too dark with a camera like this, you’re better off resorting to using lighting to properly light your scene.

Shooting at 1080p 50p in 2D, the footage is incredibly smooth, while retaining all of the information in the picture without any moiré or other associated problems you’d get if using interlaced footage. It’s fair to say that this camera shoots some of the best footage that we’ve seen from any camcorder.

Of course, it’s 3D that’s going to excite the most interest. As we said at the start of the review, the dual 3MOS system means that each eye gets an image that’s as detailed and accurately coloured as for 2D shooting.

On top of that, the Z10000 has some specific features designed to make shooting 3D easier and more rewarding. A dedicated convergence point dial lets you manually adjust the 3D convergence point: objects in front of this jump out of the screen; those behind disappear into the background.

A dedicated convergence wheel lets you take full control of the 3D effect.

Having the glasses-free 3D screen certainly helps when making this adjustment, but it’s not always easy to see what’s going on. We found that the tight viewing angles meant that we often saw ghosting on the screen, making it hard sometimes to accurately gauge where the convergence point was and whether or not the camera could accurately focus on the subject. In short, shooting in 3D requires a fair amount of setup before you’re ready to go, plus a good understanding of the different limitations, such as in 2D the camera can focus on objects 3cm away; in 3D mode 45cm is the minimum focal distance.

You also have to take into account whether you want to shoot at 25fps progressive or 50fps interlaced. The choice depends on what you want to shoot. We found that the progressive option gave us the best quality footage, but fast movement seemed quite jerky and didn’t look as natural; interlaced 3D produced a much smoother and more natural moving image, but the quality suffers a little as a result. For most footage, though, we’d take the smoother footage as faults in image quality are generally harder to detect in 3D.

In 3D mode the maximum optical zoom is reduced slightly to 10x from 12x in 2D mode. That’s still more flexibility that we’re used to seeing on a 3D camera, although we advise against using the zoom too much mid-shot, as you may have to adjust the convergence point to get the best result otherwise footage can look a little flat. In fairness, most of the issues you’re likely to come across are from shooting in 3D, but once you get used to what you can and can’t do in the format, the Z10000 produces stunning footage.

It’s all helped by Panasonic’s excellent Power Optical Image Stabilisation (O.I.S). On our wobble-board test it gave us rock solid video at wide-angle and only a slight hard-to-detect murmur at maximum zoom.

Overall, what’s truly brilliant about this camera is that it shoots the same high-quality footage in 2D and 3D modes. If you’re interested in shooting proper 3D footage, where you get decent control over the results, there’s nothing out there that does the same thing at anywhere near this price. Only the laggy optical zoom and over-reliance on the touchscreen for adjustments detract from it.