With my ongoing tribulations with the Panasonic SV-AV50 mini digital video camera, my final conclusion is that Panasonic is producing an ill-conceived and poorly tested product. Of course, it could just be that my unit is a lemon, but I doubt it. Besides the fact that it records its high quality video to proprietary formats, besides the fact that its terrible in low light, besides the fact its audio is sub-standard, my dumb little camera will now only produce corrupted videos once I record for more than 5 minutes.

I've tried a couple measures including reformatting my SD card to get it back in working order to no avail. The corrupted video started happening after I recorded with the unit plugged into a wall socket (plugged in because the battery only runs for about 40 minutes and that's quite useless). Weirdly, all video still continues to play fine on the actual unit, but what good does that do me? I must say, Panasonic pulled off quite the coup by getting the SV-AV50 on the cover of Wired Magazine's 2004 Gadget Edition. Don't buy this product.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 11:58 AM in general | Comments (0)