General Usage
Before you use the camcorder you are probably going to want to fully charge the battery. You can either use the dock or the power connector. I really like the dock connector, it easily allows you to sync the camera up with your computer as it has a miniUSB connection on it. It also has the AC adapter connection on it as well. I do not like that you are not able to charge the camcoder via USB. It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s just 1 extra cable you have to bring along with you.
When you first turn the camcorder on you are probably going to want to check out the menu and select the settings you want. I am not going to go through the entire menu, but I will point out a few things. The one thing that I really liked about this camera is that I can easily switch between 16:9 widescreen mode and 4:3 normal mode. Although I will probably be doing most of my shooting in 16:9 it is nice to have the 4:3 option. There are 8 scene modes you can select depeding of what you are shooting. There is also an auto mode and manual mode.
By default anti-shake is turned off, so for most shooting you are probably going to want to turn it on. It really makes a big difference. There are 10 digital effects you can use while shooting, they include things like black and white, negative, art, etc.
This camcorder does have 16GB of onboard storage space and 4 different video modes to shoot in. It also has a SDHC slot for aditional memory and the ability to choose between what storage medium you are using.
Going through each video mode with the 16GB onboard storage here is how much recording time the camcorder said I had. Take note that these numbers will most likely change when shooting. Also a full battery charge should give you around 180minutes of shooting time.
TV Super Fine: 6:35:56
TV Fine: 8:09:06
TV Normal: 10:39:36
Web & Mobile: 15:32:52
