Panasonic HC-V720 review

The HC-V720 has a good set of connection ports, including a Mini HDMI output, a Mini USB port, an A/V output jack and a 3.5mm microphone jack. It also has a shoe adaptor that you can use to mount accessories. That’s not a bad list of connections for a camcorder at this price, but we would have liked a 3.5mm headphone jack too.

VIDEO QUALITY

In our toytown video, the HC-V720 didn’t reproduce the fur of our teddy bears as well as the HC-X920, with clumps of fur looking like half-cooked grains of rice rather than fine hairs.

There’s also a lot of noise, even in the well-lit parts of the toytown scene. Compression artefacts add to this, making the HC-V720’s footage look much shabbier than that of the HC-X920’s. Of course, the HC-X920 is much more expensive, so this is to be expected, and the quality of the HC-V720’s footage really is more than good enough for recording family videos and documenting events.

This screen capture shows the Panasonic HC-V720’s image quality. Notice the lack of texture on the toy chick’s fur where the light hits it

As for detail, the HC-V720 falls short of the standard set by the HC-X920, with very dark and black objects having very little detail, if any. Lighter, brighter objects fare better, but the staining of our wooden train track, although apparent, fell victim to compression and didn’t have the sharpness seen in the HC-X920’s footage.

This shot was taken at full optical zoom in daylight, there’s a good amount of detail, but it’s starting to be lost

The effects of compression were also evident in daylight footage, with the flowers on our trellis not appearing as sharp or as detailed as they did on the HC-X920’s footage. Brightly lit reflective surfaces also lost detail and became large patches of bright white, but there was little noise evident in daylight footage. The HC-V720 also captured much more detail in daylight, even on dark objects. Noise was apparent on indoor footage under fluorescent lights, but it wasn’t enough to ruin your videos.

CONCLUSION

We like the Panasonic HC-V720, especially its Wi-Fi features, but we don’t like the cheap feel of the controls, particularly the zoom lever. We can forgive this, though, thanks to great image quality for the price, a 3MOS camera is far better but then it costs twice as much. If you’re looking for a cheaper camcorder then this fits the bill perfectly.