What surprised you most about your HMC150?

I love every aspect of this camera, but the part that surprised me the most either has to be how light weight and yet how much of a tank this camera is, or how amazing it performs in low light. I was shooting in a parking lot the other night, there was 1 street lamp, and I had the camera fully exposed and only at 6db and it was if it was daytime.
 
Love:
Low Light
Quality
Light Weight
XLR's
SDHC Media with great compression

Hate:
AVCHD and Vegas are like Oil and Water at the moment.
 
The first thing I did when I got my camera was take it to the local park and shoot it side by side with my DVX... I was most surprised by the difference in the onboard LCD between the HMC & DVX. I had to pump the chroma level to +7 on the HMC to make saturation on the LCDs match.

But when I imported the footage into FCP and watched on my HDTV I realized that this is just a difference in the LCD... the raw footage is more saturated than what appears on the HMC's LCD.
 
Thomas, isn't the zoom speed adjustable? Usually slow zoom is considered good. I've heard complaints about other cameras becasue the zoom was too fast.
 
I was a little shocked that many of the on-screen functions like flip, wfm and focus assist aren't available on an external monitor.
 
That's very true about the LCD on the cam. Doesn't truly display the content as I shot a lot of stuff side by side with the HVX and although the HVX LCD is a POS and is soft and not as sharp, the color info is way better.


For me. I think I'm happy that it's overal a better cam than my HVX and that's at 1/3 of the price of what it took me to get a working HVX with media and P2store. That alone makes me happy camper.

I also love it's low-light and its lightweight option. The only thing that I think it's missing is a timelapse option. If it had that, I'd be completely stoked.


The media is also the message... And that message is no more expensive proprietary media. That's probably why they came out with the less expensive P2 media. IF this came out 6 months earlier, I might not have bought the HMC as I was happy with the original HVX.


Overall though it's a solid cam and will be for a while.....
 
Panasonic should support Quicktime format next time, just like JVC GY-HM100U, of course the tiny CCD on the JVC leaves a lot to be desired, especially at low night (anyone here have demo video at night to share?). Transcoding is pain in the neck and I do not want to buy another POWERFUL Mac just to handle AVCHD.
After using HMC150, I really hate using my SONY HDR-HC3 camera (video quality is still excellent for a single CMOS/CCD with ample light). Being able to adjust focus, exposure and iris (plus many more) is really good for a starter.

For its price, HMC150 is an excellent camera with dirt cheap media (reuses as many times as you want)despite the horrible LCD screen. Just my 2 cents.
 
The good: The overall look of the film like images coming out of the camera [The Panny MoJo I guess].

The bad: Images can be somewhat soft at times.

All in all I have to say that for the money I was surprised how good the carmea is in both images and features.
True bangs for your bucks.
 
Coming from a DVX100b i love the HD and the light weight :)

I sometimes do Salsa training vids for friends, on the DVX i would have to put the DVX in pause mode whilst the dancers would check their moves. I dont like tape cams in pause mode but on the HMC i can leave it in pause mode safe in the knowledge that theres nothing to break and no heads to wear out lol
 
I was most surprised how soft the image is at all times, and how hard the AVCHD codec it to edit... even when you superceed all the specs needed
 
Besides nice image quality (I don't mind its softness at all), weigth and ugly mattebox cover I was surprised by how great it worked with my 35mm adapter - love focus assist, ability to lock the focus ring, LCD flipping (if only the text info and waveform monitor weren't displayed upside down...)
 
lifepo4 said:
Panasonic should support Quicktime format next time
Click to expand...
Or how about Apple just decides to support the AVC-HD standard .m2ts, just like every other editor on the planet does? (well, not Avid yet, but they will). Seems a lot easier for Mohammed to go to the mountain, doesn't it? It's a simple software change for Apple.

Transcoding is pain in the neck and I do not want to buy another POWERFUL Mac just to handle AVCHD.
Click to expand...
So don't transcode. Use any other editor. Don't blame Panasonic, Sony, Canon, JVC, Sharp, Samsung, and every other AVCHD manufacturer for Apple's stubbornness.
 
Love :
Low light. Had a wedding in a DARK DARK place. +12db and the lowlight capability of this camera saved theday.

Hate :
Slow servo zoom and SLOW SLOW SLOW manual focus. Can't stand it. The XH-A1 had 10x the better focus ring.
 
Surpised by the low light capabilties and the well thought out crappy lens cap ...:)
& I have been shooting 1080p/i only lately its sweet and pretty sharp.

Hidef I love the manual focus it feels very natural to my fingers.
 
Great picture, lightweight.

On the other hand the fast zoom servo is really loud, and it would be nice if the lcd held full 19:9 aspect.

Overall an amazing camera.
 
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