Cons: Image stabilizer, automatic white balanse, lens could be wider
The Bottom Line: Well worth the money spent, gives good performance without too many expensive useless extra. Make sure you have steady hand to use this one.
akpch's Full Review: Panasonic Palmcorder® PV-GS120 Mini DV Camcor...
My primary concern when shopping for camcorder was good low-light performance and while this one does not quite deliver as good night video as 1/4'' CCD analog Sony it still does good job compared to other on the market within similar price range. I do not care about stills - you have to make choice here: stills or video and video this is what I am buying it for. I think I will explain it later.
I took this one into 9 days vacation trip and I liked the video quality it delivered. It was really good outdoors and in most cases indoors. The place where it is enough light for reading you can confidently shoot good quality video. That said I would like to describe my overall experience with this camera.
Things I liked about it:
1. Manual controls. You can do manual focus, white balance, shutter speed, picture gain (analog of CCD sensitivity in still photography), scene type (did not see much difference on this one) The only one that is missing is audio level.
2. White balance. Two presets, one manual where you can set it up by pointing to piece of white paper and have most accurate WB
3. Color viewfinder (could be little higher resolution)
4. Battery life (one is enough for one cassette and little more)
5. Size
6. Extra bright LCD, brightness can be easily switched between bright and normal.
7. Pass through mode where you can connect it to PC through FireWire and than capture real-life picture or picture sent from cable box, VCR or analog camcorder. Quality of such digitizer is quite high.
8. Zoom mic (IMO not quite true zoom mic but still really nice:))
9. Remote
I did not like:
1. EIS, stands for Electronic Image Stabilization. You should have steady hands while shooting or very steady hands when shooting with zoom x5 or more. Not sure about Sony but this one is too weak. Sometimes (bad light, no contrast subject, wide angle adapter on) it will not work, but when it works there no much of the difference. Using viewfinder somewhat helps. I think this is one of the most important features for small size camcorders since it is really difficult to hold one steady.
2. EIS
3. Manual modes somewhat difficult to access.
4. Limited number of WB presets (only 2 presets and one manual)
5. Automatic white balance sometimes missing. Sample - forest with lots of greens. Scene comes out bluish. Another problem - sometimes it fluctuates, well visible when there is gray background - it tend to became bluish than in couple of second - yellowish, than bluish again.
5. Backlight mode is difficult to turn on while shooting using viewfinder.
6. Lens could be wider on wide side, 10x still nice however
7. Battery cannot be charged while shooting using AC connector.
8. No progressive mode for video (I did not quite expect it will be interlaced)
Things I don't care about:
1. Leica lens - quality does not quite matter with 290K CCD as long as it is coated.
1. Still capability
2. USB connectivity
3. Digital zoom above 25x
4. Night Shot capability that is useless anyway. I would rather like to see Sony's implementation where you can shoot in infrared - just like with my analog one.
Overall good performer and well worth the money spent. See if cons above are important to you and I am sure in more or less degree you will find them in all devices of that price range and often in much more expensive ones. Just be aware.
For those of you considering PV-GS200 - you are paying extra for focus ring (which is only nice thing), more resolution for video (which is barely visible on regular TV), for higher resolution stills (which is much worse than any $200 still camera delivers) and, most important, _lower_ low light sensitivity, and this is why: Having more pixels on the same CCD size means smaller pixels size, which means less light per pixel, and that effectively means smaller light sensitivity which. Looking for good quality indoors - pick camcorder with large CCD and smaller amount of pixels. Everything else is just marketing.
PS. Wide-angle adapter is must have for this one. I am using Sony 0.6x, which I am not quite happy with but it does the job when necessary. See my review for that one later.
PPS. I cmpared picture quality with single CCD Panasonic (1/6 '') which I used to ove and found that picture quality both outdoor and indoor is significantly better in this one. That one was $200 cheaper.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 645 Recommended for: Budget Buyers - Best Values to Fit the Budget
Remanufactured to like-new condition; includes 90-day warranty MiniDV camcorder and still camera with 3-megapixel CCD 10x optical zoom lens (700x digi...More at Amazon Marketplace
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