Panasonic HDC-SD1 — the camcorder ahead of its time
The Panasonic HDC-SD1 was introduced in the fall of 2006. It became available in Japan in December of the same year and reached America in the early 2007. The original $1,500 price was quickly reduced to $1,200, still there were not many takers.
For an average Joe, the camcorder as well as the recording media were too expensive, the AVC codec was too taxing for editing on a contemporary home PCs, and where would the owner of this camcorder watch the recorded videos anyway? Only a quarter of American households owned a high definition TV set in 2006. YouTube launched a year earlier, but its video quality was no better than from a 1965 skip-field PortaPak.
Professionals preferred feature-laden HDV camcorders with easy-to-edit MPEG-2 codec, cheap tape cassettes with one hour recording time, and a host of recording modes, manual functions and physical controls that the SD1 did not have.
Some reviewers hurried to call the camcorder an expensive toy, but a toy it was not. It was a halo camcorder, heralding the things to come: high definition video, recorded as computer files on solid-state media, not as a sequence of tracks on magnetic tape.
That fall Panasonic introduced not one, but two tapeless HD camcorders. One was the HDC-SD1, that recorded onto memory cards. Another was the HDC-DX1 — the same lens, the same sensor block, the same codec, but it recorded onto 8-cm DVD discs.
The HDC-SD1 launched on December 1st in Japan at an MSRP of approximately 180,000 yen (≈ $1,527). The HDC-DX1 was released in Japan two weeks later, priced at approximately 160,000 yen (≈ $1,358).
I have never had a camcorder that recorded onto optical media, because I thought it was a cumbersome stopgap solution on the way to solid-state media. Full-size DVDs were too large for a handheld camcorder, while mini-DVDs had a pitiful capacity of only 1.4 GB, enough to fit about 15 minutes of video at 12 Mbit/s bitrate.
When the AVCHD format launched in May 2006, only 8-cm DVD discs were supported as recording media. Thankfully, the format was quickly amended two months later to allow memory cards — SD Memory Card and Memory Stick — and hard disk drives as applicable recording media as well. This made sense, because in January 2006, SD Card Association approved SDHC specification that extended SD card capacity beyond 2 GB, and by the fall of 2006, 4 GB SDHC cards became available. Price? Only $200. But it was a true file-based re-recordable media, so videos could be dumped to a computer at faster-than-realtime speed, and then the card could be reformatted in seconds.
As memory cards were becoming cheaper while their capacity grew, optical recording media was quickly abandoned.
Viewing and editing of AVC videos became easier as well. CoreAVC developed a fast AVC decoder. Sony Vegas 9 significantly improved support for AVCHD including videos recorded on non-Sony camcorders. Suddenly, AVCHD became watchable and editable on a mid-range Windows PC. So, when I saw a used SD1 in Circuit City, I immediately bought it. I felt as if I were a thief, paying only $450 for it.
18 years after it launched, it remains as modern as any digital camera you can buy right now. In fact, it is better in some ways. For example, the pickup element is made of three CCDs. All CCD sensors have global shutter, while most CMOS sensors have rolling shutter. This means that motion looks more natural and is easier to stabilize in post if needed. Having separate sensors per color component ensures better color separation. A quiet built-in fan cools down the electronics, so there are no issues with overheating.
Small, but hefty, with the frame cast from a light alloy, the camcorder looks and feels very classy. Outside, the main body is made of aluminum. A transparent plastic cover over the the LCD monitor makes it shine like pearl.
The battery pack is inserted into an internal compartment, this means that a larger pack cannot be used. The battery lasts about 40 minutes, or as long as it takes to fill a 4GB card. Original Panasonic batteries were sold for $120, and you needed at least two or three of them. Third-party batteries could not be used at first, as the battery has a chip inside and uses an encrypted protocol to exchange data with the camcorder, so the camcorder rejects non-OEM batteries.
To save on batteries and to be able to shoot for longer, I rigged up an external battery. It outputs 9V, which is lower than nominal 9.3V, but the camcorder works just fine. With this setup I can get about 7 hours of uninterrupted shooting. This is more than enough, considering that a 32GB card, the largest capacity the camcorder accepts, stores six hours of video at the highest bitrate.
Later, the security protocol was cracked, and now I can buy third-party batteries for less than $20 apiece, which is great not only because they are cheaper than OEM, but also because you cannot buy them from Panasonic anymore.
Optical image stabilization is very good even by today’s standards. Audio is recorded as 5.1 surround sound, and is noise-free thanks to the absence of tape transport. Audio level can be adjusted manually both for the built-in as well as for an external microphone. White balance, exposure and focus can be adjusted manually as well. The center of the image is magnified to improve focusing precision.
The only thing about it that is antiquated is the 1080i interlaced recording format. But with a decent deinterlacer, the footage can be converted into believable 1080p. 🔲
