We've been using the SD5 for about a year and a half now with no real video quality issues. It's been able to handle pretty much everything I've thrown at it, including some pretty tough light situations, all of which I shoot in auto mode. Today was a different story.

Not sure where things went wrong, but I wanted to get some feedback and see if anyone has any ideas. Here's the video as uploaded to LIHD:

http://www.livinginhd.com/cron/go/video/view?vid_id=982195&pref_tab=videos

Note that the LIHD uploader seems to kill quality (and aspect ratio) during uploading. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong there, but overall the uploaded copy looks a lot worse than what I uploaded, so I also have a high quality version on my Facebook page set to allow everyone to view, so as long as you can log in to FB, you should be able to see this (let me know if you can't):

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=150694319173&saved

The problem - The girls aren't really in focus, they're pretty soft, and the ones at the outer edge of the video aren't in focus at all. Watching the raw AVCHD output, it looks like the focus is okay at center, and gets progressively worse out from center. It also appears the background is in focus the whole time. I've never seen this shooting her cheer competitions with this camera, so I'm not sure what to think. Lighting was pretty good (for a cheer competition anyway), the only real difference was that I was further back than usual, as the front row of the upper level provided a clear shot with no possibility of any parents blocking shots if they decided to stand up. I'm thinking maybe I was just too far away and auto-focus couldn't handle it. There were others with camcorders up there, most of which were older MiniDV cams, so I'll be curious to see how they compare if I can get my hands on any footage.

Oh, and this wasnt noticeable in the on-board screen either. Granted, it's only a 2" screen, but things looked perfect in it. I was seriously disappointed to get home and find all 3 clips I shot had the same issue. This is a fairly new SD card with other clips on it that all look good, so it seems more like a camera issue to me.