Review on 📷 High-Definition Capture with Panasonic HDC-TM20 SD & HDD Camcorder (Silver) by Gary Duncan

This camera is good for home video in not very difficult conditions, but not for more. Works great in automatic mode. Although the camera doesn't have a viewfinder, the LCD is bright enough even in the sun. The camera can even adjust the brightness of the LCD to suit lighting conditions. Switching on is very quick and the automatic lens cap is very convenient. The touchscreen is useful for spot AF, known as tracking AFAE. This means that the camera will attempt to spot the subject in situ and track the subject by adjusting focus and exposure. Sometimes it doesn't recognize the subject, but even then it can't focus on the selected location. I wish it was possible sometimes to turn off spot AE and tracking and just do spot AF. The only other brand that has this dot mode is Sony. On Sony cameras, Spot AF and Spot AE can be done separately, but there is no tracking. Spot AF is important because manual focus is useless (which is true for most entry-level cameras). It takes about a minute to reach the best sharpness, but even then the image is usually noticeably blurry. Low-level performance is only suitable for documenting events. The image quality is not great, but the interior light is able to make closed objects visible. MagicPix greatly improves the image of stationary objects, but the movement looks terrible. It should be called SleepingKids because it best suits this mode. Focusing in photo mode is surprisingly slow. Although the camera always focuses the image, if you half-press the image button, the camera tries to refocus and loses focus for half a second. Pressing the button fully at this point results in a very poor picture. It should also be noted that the resolution of the sensor is only 1.17 megapixels. The image is obviously digitally extrapolated to 2.1 megapixels. The HD Writer AE 1.0 software that comes with the camera is difficult to use even for simple edits like cutting out unwanted parts. Conversion to other formats is limited. Do your best when recording, as the editing may take longer than the recording itself. If you write often, try not to write anything you don't want to keep.