Checking out a new camera on A-dock

Saturday was one of the few rain free days we had here this past week. Our weekend was a little shorter than usual because we had to attend a Sunday wedding, but on Saturday, we decided to check out our new low cost video camera, a Panasonic HX-WA03. We've only had this camera for a few weeks (one cruise) and we have to say, we are impressed.

By way of background, we own a lot of professional video equipment, which we used in our business for years. The world changed and now our Sony DVCAM equipment is no longer useful, since the world has changed to all digital.

Since we didn't have any digital equipment, we decided to try something new. The Panasonic HX-WA03 that we recently purchased is far from professional and its $179 price probably reflects that. But it works really well. In fact, it will do some things better and faster than our old Sony equipment did.

It's a little odd looking, with its pistol grip styling, but it feels pretty good in your  hand and you can easily drop it in your pocket.

We mounted it on our bridge and recorded some footage on our trip back from Long Island.  The video was very acceptable and we included that in the blog post previous to this one.

This weekend, we decided to just shoot the usual amateur stuff: our marina and the folks who keep their boats there.  The YouTube video shown below is the result.

It took us two hours to edit 13 minutes of video down to the 3+ minutes you'll see here and even at that, our "video" still needs a lot of work.

The Panasonic HX-WA03 camera is waterproof (to a degree) and its battery lasts for an extended period. The camera also takes 16 mp still photos and has a built-in flash. This isn't great, but it works. Here's a still photo I took on our bridge.

The camera a comes with some built-in memory but you need to add an SD card to get any real recording time. We opted for a 32 gb card and that was another $30.

It has an "18X" zoom, but only 10X of that is optical and even at 10X, you must have very steady hands. We've illustrated that in the video.