I love the Panasonic SV-AV10!
This is one of the neatest gadgets that I've ever played with! In one tiny package you get:
A digital still camera
A digital video camera with sound
A voice recorder
A still image viewer
A digital video viewer (with sound through earphones)
A player for the voice recordings
A very nice little MP3 player to use with earphones
It uses those tiny "SD" memory cards. This really helped the designers keep the unit small. I've become interested in the video encoding method used. It seems to use the Microsoft MPGE4 V3 video codec and a G.726 audio codec to create .ASF files. I discovered that the older Sharp VN-EZ1 seemed to use a similar encoding scheme for the video and audio in their unit's movie files.
Sharp had a special feature in their software for "Rate Conversion." This allowed adjusting the bit rates of the audio and video in .ASF files that were created from other sources. The Panasonic software doesn't seem to do that, or I haven't learned how.
As you've probably gathered, this gadget helped me replace in one piece, several smaller items that were previously stolen from me. This is small enough that I just keep it with me. Now all I have to do is to not get mugged...
Someone else started a Yahoo Group devoted to this gadget:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/panasonicAV10/
The Panasonic site has some interesting things about this and other SD memory card based gadgets. I looked at this page and was hooked:
