Just bought a cheapie com­pact dig­i­tal (well, next to the Nikons I usu­ally chuck around) to do some low effort film­ing with and decided to (lit­er­ally) take it for a drive. Titles and speed are the only changes I’ve made to the footage apart from the fact it’s only PAL widescreen.

The cam­era did okay, but for the slight inabil­ity to focus a lot of the time (and for­get man­ual focus, this is a strictly for-dummies camera) — no ver­ti­cal flar­ing or other weird­ness that has plagued many a dig­i­tal still cam­era in the past.

For me, it was a toss up between jello-vision D90 land and get­ting a com­pact dig­i­tal that would do HD (1080/50i) well enough to last in sit­u­a­tions where hir­ing a real cam­era is total overkill. Biggest down­side so far seems to be bat­tery life. The inter­nal mic is decent enough for a lot of uses because, beau­ti­fully, the whole thing is pretty much solid state and the zoom is internal/not-that-noisy. The few unfa­vor­able (audio) reviews out there seem to come from the party video crowd — and they’re right, no, it will not deal well with Tiësto’s basslines.

Crap bat­tery life aside, seems like a decent cam­era so far.