Here's the Play mode menu. I can't show the record mode menu because the camera only outputs video in the playback mode.

A typical play mode screen showing the last picture taken, the battery status, time and date, image number and the resolution/image size.

To quickly locate any desired image for playback you use the thumbnail display mode. Navigate through the thumbnails with the 4-way jog switch and then highlight the picture to display full screen.

To zoom-in to a section of the image you move the selection rectangle and then press the shutter release to magnify it.

With the camera hooked up to a TV you can show all your images using the slideshow function.

Steve's Conclusion

Due to its size and noise, yes, it is a noisey camera, it does not make a very good "candid" type of camera. The SuperDisk drive is somewhat noisey and you also get a simulated "motor drive" sound effect when you push the shutter button. Like the Sony Mavicas the SuperDiskCam has a huge 2.5-inch color LCD and a rechargeable lithium battery pack that lets you shoot hundreds of pictures per charge. The 3x optical zoom lens covers a useful range from medium wideangle to moderate telephoto (35-105mm) and focuses down to 30cm in normal mode, the dedicated macro mode is good down to about 6cm.

I found the SuperDiskCam to be rather slow at initial startup taking around fifteen seconds to verify the diskette and extend the lens before it was ready to capture the first image. When sitting idle the camera goes into sleep mode to conserve the battery and you have to press the shutter button to wake it up, this takes a good ten seconds or so. Storing captured images takes from three to eight seconds for JPEG and a good two or more minutes of "whirring and clicking" to store an uncompressed TIFF image.

Indoors the big color LCD is excellent and outdoors it is highly useable even in direct sunlight. There is an adjustable LCD backlight but turning it up or down too far throws off the ability to judge the exposure. I would prefer to have an optical viewfinder to allow the camera to be used in the "up against your face" mode that most of us are accustomed to. This would alleviates the problem of viewing an LCD in high ambient light conditions and make it much easier to follow rapidly moving subjects. It does take a while to get used to holding a camera out in front of you instead of pressing it up against your face.

This camera is capable of capturing motion and sound at the same time. If you like sending 12-seconds movie clips to Grandma showing the baby walking it is great. And once the kid starts talking then Grandma will be able to hear that as well. The sound capture can also be used in conjunction with the still image capture so keeping notes attached to a picture is really simple. The audio is recorded in mono so it isn't that much of a disk waster and it's recorded at high frequency so it's quite clear. Hearing your recorded audio is no problem thanks to a really big speaker on the back of the camera.

If you like recording your buddy's golf swing the SuperDiskCam has got a burst recording mode that lets you capture up to 5 images in 1024x768 resolution at just less than one second intervals. Another interesting feature is the time lapse recording mode. You can set the camera to capture an image once a minute or as long as once every 24 hours so it could be used as a NannyCam if concealed in the book case.

Downloading images to the computer was a breeze thanks to a high-speed USB port. If you're looking for a serial port connection forget it, this camera doesn't have one. Once you install the USB drivers Windows 98 "sees" the SuperDiskCam like a removeable floppy drive. You don't need any special download software, just fire up Explorer and drag and drop your files to the hard drive. Transfer speed was excellent requiring about two seconds per file to copy them over, so even if the 120MB diskette is completely full it should only take a couple of minutes to transfer the whole thing. Panasonic has included a file conversion utility that lets you take ordinary JPG image files and sticks the necessary header information into them so that they can be uploaded and displayed on the camera.

The SD5000 is a good camera but there's no getting around the fact that it is a BIG camera physically. The image quality is good but not great. Too much compression is used even on the SuperFine JPEG images, they're only 500-600KB in size for 3-megapixel images, other camera's images are about 1.2MB in size. The metering system is often "tricked" outdoors with bright sky in the background and the images lack the color saturation (depth) that is common to other cameras in this resolution class.