Panasonic NV-GS120

This camera has great image quality that makes it stand out from the crowd.

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Price: £540

Manufacturer: Panasonic

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With three image sensor chips, the picture quailiy is instantly noticeable, with vivid colours, sharp lines and no fuzziness or grain. It also takes good still pictures. There are a few compromises, but these are inevitable given the price.

Jonathan Parkyn, Personal Computer World 27 Jul 2004

As with digital stills cameras, one of the crucial elements governing the quality of a camcorder?s recorded image is the CCD. While megapixels are ever multiplying in stills photography devices, DV video has a fixed resolution (720 x 576 pixels in Pal territories).

There are other ways of improving a digital video recording, however. One such method is to employ more sophisticated image-processing systems, such as those used in many professional video devices. Another way of improving colour reproduction and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is to use a physically larger CCD or, better still, three separate image sensor chips, each taking on a primary colour (red, green or blue) on its own.

Until recently, it?s been rare to see three-chip camcorders for less than £1,000. It?s a modern miracle, then, that Panasonic has managed to include a holy triumvirate of image sensors in a camcorder as small and cheap as the NV-GS120. The improvement in picture quality is instantly noticeable, with vivid colours, sharp lines, no fuzziness or grain both indoors and in natural light. It?s at the point where it?s almost embarrassing to compare the camera?s performance with any of the other models on test.

The Leica Dicomar 10x optical zoom lens almost certainly colludes with the sensor array to aid quality even further and the NV-GS120 is no wimp when it comes to taking stills. Its 1.7megapixel top setting was the best of all the camcorders on test.

There are, of course, a handful of disappointments, many of which have the faint whiff of compromise about them. What looks promisingly like a focus ring, for example, is just a bit of decoration. Those wanting to focus manually will need to faff about with the control buttons normally used for fast forwarding and rewinding, which most enthusiasts will find very unsatisfactory. Meanwhile, an equally encouraging ?cinema mode? turns out to be a dodgy letterbox setting that simply crops the top and bottom off the image rather than reshaping it to a 16:9 ratio suitable for widescreen TVs. A final crushing blow is the absence of an analogue input something that will put many advanced users off an otherwise excellent camcorder.

Contact: Panasonic 08705 357 357
www.panasonic.co.uk

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