Actually I just bought a rather hefty but well-performing Panasonic TM900 last night. Here are my first impressions:

• It feels solid, well-made.
• The ability to trim video on the camera is really great (especially because the video it outputs is so large that it would overwhelm my two-year-old laptop’s video editing abilities).
• The picture quality I can’t judge just yet. Everyone says it’s amazing but I’ve only shot in low light. It looks OK in low light.
• There is a tiny fan on it and in a silent room the internal microphone does pick up the fan. Not good. The TM700 famously had the same problem but everyone said that it would be fixed on the TM900. I can say definitively that it is not fixed. I guess I need an external mic.
• The screen resolution is crap and the menu system has unbelievably dorky looking icons.
• The TM700 batteries don’t fit it, and the extended-life batteries are not available yet, so I’m stuck with two 90 minute batteries that must be charged in the camera, one at a time.

So – some negatives. I’m hoping the picture quality makes up for those, or I’ll feel like a sucker who bought a video camera because it was brand new and the press-release-copypasta reviews used loads of superlative terms (“stunning!” “magnificient!” “glorious!”).