I am about to buy a Panasonic HDC-TM300 camcorder. I'd like to buy some Class 6 32 GB flash cards to give me more record time. Panasonic make their own flash card but it is about double the price of the competition. I did see one review of it though that said it was more reliable and had more thorough testing and longer guarantees. That is important to me since I am a film-maker and one of the uses I'll put this camera to is on recces of locations. I don't want flash storage failing on me. However when I called Panasonic they said their flash card was no different to the competition. Now I'm confused! I'll pay more for reliability but not for a brand name.

Any advice? Any products that stand out?

Thank you

I have always used Sandisk and found them ultra-reliable. They are a bit more expensive than other makes but not excessively so.

thanks Guru - I've used Sandisk successfully with stills but never used flash cars with video before so I'm a little more cautious this time. These Panasonic ones were nearly $300 for 32 GB!

Well, I'm using Sandisk 16Gb cards which cost about $60 on Amazon. (Class 4 is good enough for AVCHD) and I would suggest getting 16GB cards, which still give you about an hour and a half of full HD rather than forking out a few hundred bucks just to avoid swapping cards after 90 mins (unless you really have to have such a long time of unbroken recording).

My understanding is that this camera will give 4 hours 17 minutes at highest resolution on 32GB so over 2 hours on 16GB so i think smaller cards will be a better way to go. Difference between Class 4 and 6 is just speed? Will that not affect recording video in any way? Just back-up times to computer?

Cards with Class 4 stamped on them seem to be de rigeur for high def avchd camcorders now. They have the necessary read and write times so I wouldn't go spending more money on Class 6 cards if cheaper Class 4's will do the job.

It's just speed. With digital recording (theoretically) there should be no difference in quality from any recording medium. The images on a cheap card will look the same as the images on an expensive card. It's not like film or analogue tape where you could get "bleeding" and such since you're just recording a series of ones and zeros. The only difference is in reliability and (maybe) some drop-out issues. Of course if the cards aren't fast enough to record the incoming information... that's not good!

My latest toy (um... I mean "equipment" purchase) records avchd at 24Mb/s just fine on class 4 Sandisk cards. It didn't like class 2 cards at all and just let me know, in the viewfinder, that I shouldn't be such a cheapskate and should spend some money on decent cards!

From the time/Gigabyte ratio you've quoted, it sounds like your camera records at 17Mb/s and class 4 will handle that easily. BTW. The difference between 17Mb/s and 24Mb/s according to my unscientific experiments isn't noticable to any normal person. I haven't done any time-trials on the difference between transferring information from class 4 cards and class 6 cards, so I can't help you there, sorry.