Welcome to a Digital Camera Battery specialist of the Camcorder Battery
The optical image stabilizer (OIS) deserves special mention. It works really well, even at the 46x zoom setting. Normally at such high zoom, objects shake and dart around, but on this camcorder with OIS turned on they appeared remarkably stable with little "ghosting" (inappropriate motion blur).
One of the few areas where the HC-V700M stumbles: still shots. Shooting at the 6.1MP setting, pictures came out plenty sharp, but a few colors were oversaturated and inaccurate, such as light blue printing out as aquamarine. Worst of all is the blue hue where we should see white, an exposure problem Panasonic needs to fix.
This camcorder comes with manual controls, such as those for setting shutter speed with battery such as canon NB-1L battery , canon NB-2L battery , canon BP-511 battery , canon NB-5L battery , canon NB-4L battery , canon NB-5H battery , nikon CR-V3 battery , nikon EN-EL2 battery , Olympus FE-250 battery , Fujifilm NP-40 battery , Samsung VP-MS12 battery , Sharp VR-BL1 battery , focus, and white balance. To my surprise, they are actually practical to use. Most other consumer models include manual controls, but often they’re stuffed so deep into the menus they’re basically useless. On the HC-V700M, however, I found these screen-based controls almost as easy to use as physical controls and buttons.
The 3-inch touchscreen responds well to my finger-tap. Navigating the menu system felt a little strange at first, but I quickly cottoned to it. On most models’ screens, you swipe a finger across the panel to bring up commands arrayed in a row along the panel bottom. On this screen, however, you first tap an icon in the lower left corner of the screen to pop up a menu column. This placement makes a lot of sense. My left hand’s holding that outside edge of the panel anyway, so it’s a breeze to swing my index finger or thumb over to tap icons.
To be sure, I’m not in love with all aspects of this camcorder’s handling. It’s easy to dive into the menus, but you still have to scroll through as many as four menu columns to select the function you want, and even then you sometimes still have to drill down. Also, I wish Panasonic included the option to save videos and still-shots in the same folder. Many people shoot both video and still-shots, forcing the user to tap her way to a new folder each time she wants switch between video and photo playback and preview.
Finally, switching between record and playback is a bit of a pain. Video Record is located at the middle setting of a slider switch; I kept overshooting when pushing the switch in either direction.
Besides disappointing still-shots and a few ergonomic hiccups, my only other beef is with the unit’s 1790mAh lithium-ion battery. The HC-V700M conked out after only an hour and 25 minutes in our rundown tests. The good news is that the battery recharged almost as quickly, so if you buy a second battery pack ($72) and a stand-alone battery charger ($63), you’ll get near continuous operation.
The supplied video editing software, HD Writer AE 4.0, works only in Windows, but I had no problem importing photos into iPhoto ’09 and all video formats into iMovie ’11, except for those shot in the new 1080/60p format, which iMovie doesn’t recognize.
Panasonic’s HC-V700M is an uncommonly good value in a compact camcorder. If you don’t plan to shoot a lot of stills and can live with relatively short battery life, put this model on your short list. Even if you kick in an extra $117 for the extended-life VW-VBK360 battery, which doubles your recording time to nearly three hours, the price is right.