Sample images: Panasonic HDC-SD1

The SD1 is capable of shooting some really nice photos; at its best, they're sharp with nicely saturated colors.

The SD1's automatic white balance tends to be noticeably cool, making most of this white flower look aqua.

This video frame, shown here at actual resolution, clearly displays the interlacing artifacts from combining the two 540-pixel fields into a single 1,080 vertical. If you zoom in (not shown), you can also see artifacts from the horizontal interpolation necessary to combine the three 960-pixel-wide (a guesstimate, since Panasonic does not supply this info) sensors into a single 1,440-pixel-wide image.

The SD1 shoots low-noise, low-light video, though it's a bit softer than we'd like. The automatic white-balance issues that affect the SD1 in daylight also crop up indoors. The frame grab on the upper left, shot on the daylight WB preset, is closest to correct; the one on the bottom right was shot on auto. (The one on the left was pulled from the middle of a zoom sequence, hence the softness and slight distortion.)