• Welcome to BirdForum, the internet's largest birding community with thousands of members from all over the world. The forums are dedicated to wild birds, birding, binoculars and equipment and all that goes with it.

    Please register for an account to take part in the discussions in the forum, post your pictures in the gallery and more.
ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

Panasonic HDC-TM300 + Kowa TSN-883 (1 Viewer)

Looks good, heat distortion can't be helped. I'm also interested in this camcorder or its "little brother" the HDC-TM20. Any more info on your experiences with it is appreciated.
 
That was my first try with this combination and only my second with this camcorder. Shortly after that I got busy with moving to another city and haven't got another opportunity yet to go out and take videos but hope to resume soon. On this particular example besides the heat distortion there was also a lot of wind (you can tell by the sound for example) which occasionally shook things pretty hard. Also I didn't use the remote to zoom in and when I put my finger to zoom there was quite a lot of shaking. My first impression is that it is a good camera. The flaws in my examples seem to be due mostly to my lack of technique rather than camera limitations. This model has a number of features tht I wanted in a camcorder: viewfinder, input for an external mic, a cold shoe for supporting mic (and other stuff as lights for example), filter threads, flash memory. Drawbacks are small aperture and for stills, a lot of megapixels on a very small sensor. I use a MacBook (with Snow Leopard OS) and Imovie will import the files directly from this camcorder making it extremely easy to view and edit.

Dalcio
 
Last edited:
Panasonic HDC-TM300 + Olympus TCON 1.7 tele-lens

Another example with this camera -
Panasonic HDC-TM300 + Olympus TCON 1.7 tele-lens + Sennheiser
MKE 400 Compact Video Camera Shotgun Microphone [handheld, birds at about 50 meters, can't remember how much I zoomed in]:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgqBuN3f_eA

Dalcio
 
Image quality is very nice. One improvement you can make is to aim on your subject and keep the scope pointed at it without bouncing. The video was rather jumpy. Too much jumping results in motion blur which washes out the fine details of the image.
 
One improvement you can make is to aim on your subject and keep the scope pointed at it without bouncing. The video was rather jumpy. Too much jumping results in motion blur which washes out the fine details of the image.

Agree. Most of it was my poor technique (for example I could have used the remote to zoom in and out in parts of the test video). Part of it was wind shaking the tripod and heat shimmering on the long distance shots.

Dalcio
 
Warning! This thread is more than 13 years ago old.
It's likely that no further discussion is required, in which case we recommend starting a new thread. If however you feel your response is required you can still do so.

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top