OTHER TECH

Rather than connect directly to a computer, the AV10 comes with a USB reader/writer. You slide the SD card into it to upload video clips and photos to your PC and to download music. You can also transfer images and clips back into the AV10 as long as they originated there. Two easy-to-use applications that run under Windows 98 or higher are supplied: SD-MovieStage for viewing and editing your photos and video clips, and RealJukebox for managing your music. Panasonic doesn't provide a way to transfer voice memos to your computer, but you could connect the AV10's earphone jack to your sound card's line input and save them as WAV files.

My 1-minute, 4-second Minerva clip occupied 2.4 MB on the 64-MB SD card included with the AV10. I had chosen the Fine, or highest-quality, mode from among four modes of MPEG-4 recording. If I used the card only for video, I could store a total of 20 minutes on it. The other modes - Normal, Economy1, and Economy2 - store 32, 60, and 80 minutes, respectively. In comparing the four modes, I found no difference in the mono audio quality, but the Fine mode looked much sharper than the Economy modes. The resolutions range from 320 x 240 to 176 x 144 pixels. The video (between 6 and 10 frames per second) is jerky, like an old silent movie. Files are saved in the Advanced Streaming Format, a standard for delivering video and audio over a network.

The AV10 is a VGA-quality still camera for amateurs. Depending on the compression setting (Fine, Normal, or Economy), you can store between 440 and 1,760 JPEG-format images on a 64-MB card. By capturing 307,200 pixels per image, the camera's resolution falls well below those of the megapixel models that are readily available. Still, on the little LCD with its 110,000 pixels and on a quarter of a computer screen, the snapshots are fine for casual use and as attachments to e-mail.

Unfortunately, the camera won't allow you to zoom or to take extreme close-ups. And in a low-light situation you'll have to wing it, since the only way to frame the picture is through the live but murky LCD. At least there's a flash, and in any case you can always delete a picture and try again.

As small as many dedicated MP3 players, the AV10 packs an hour of music encoded at 128 kilobits per second onto a 64-MB card. It also supports the Advanced Audio Codec (AAC) format, but not Windows Media Audio (WMA), which is somewhat surprising considering Panasonic's support for WMA on its new DVD players.