Adam Chilton

I've seen a lot of these new consumer camcorders, and at first glance, they look really impressive. Right now I'm looking at the Panasonic HDC-SD9, a small consumer 3CCD cam, which says it has "Full HD 1920 x 1080p resolution at 24fps" with "520K x 3 [16:9] effective pixels." Am I reading correctly? - Full HD? 1080p?? is there a catch? I've been interested in buying a Canon GL2 for a while now, and it only has 380K effective pixels but is on a slightly bigger CCD, and also is definitly not HD, plus a lot bulkier and records to tape for a lot higher of a price. And some of these cameras have up to 30X optical zooms on them. How is that possible? So what's the deal? :blink:

also, what are some companies that make lenses that people trust?

I'm looking at getting a 2X telephoto lens for my Panasonic PV DV953D camcorder. Does anyone have any advice for buying a telephoto lens - anything I should know about telephoto lenses, be cautious about, or look for? Any help, or any resources that might help would be great. I just don't want to buy cheap equipment that makes the quality of my video suffer. Any recommendations, or good experiences would be appreciated. thanks.