Panasonic NV-GS500 review

Features
The same heart beats within the Panasonic NV-GS500 as does its predecessor -- a trio of 1/4.7-inch CCDs, relatively large sensors for a consumer camera. Each chip has a whopping 1 megapixel of resolution -- low resolution for a single-chip camera but rare in a three-chip model -- which accounts for the camera's excellent widescreen performance and its decent still-photo quality. Also unchanged from the NV-GS400, the Leica Dicomar lens offers the same 12x zoom range as well as Panasonic's optical image stabilisation, a superior solution to the electronic stabilisation typically found in consumer models.

The most significant new feature of the NV-GS500 is its 16:9 flip-out LCD, which now displays both 16:9 and 4:3 footage in their proper proportions. For outdoor viewing, you can brighten the LCD -- at some cost in battery life -- with a push of the Power LCD button.

While you can control every function of the NV-GS500 manually -- focus, zoom, iris, gain, shutter, white balance and audio levels -- all but the first two items on this list operate via menus, a process that is too cumbersome to employ frequently. Missing entirely are many of the advanced features of the NV-GS400, namely zebra stripes, colour bars and custom image adjustments.

For the point-and-shooter, the Panasonic NV-GS500 offers the usual variety of automatic options, including a fully auto mode and a variety of scene program modes, such as Sports, Portrait, Low Light, Spotlight and Surf & Snow. It also supplies a range of consumer-oriented digital effects, among them TeleMacro, for extreme close-ups; SoftSkin, which reduces wrinkles; and fader. Pro Cinema mode is a pseudo-24P effect that gives a film-like motion quality to video, but unfortunately it is available only when shooting widescreen. There are also a couple of low-light modes -- MagicPix, in which the shutter is slowed down, and Advanced MagicPix, in which you flip the LCD forward for illumination. Gone (but not missed) are many of the NV-GS400's more gimmicky effects.

In the miscellaneous features department, the Quick Start mode reduces the start-up time of the camera from almost 5 seconds to fewer than 2, but exacts a penalty in battery life. AGS (Auto Ground-Directional) is a strange new feature that automatically places the camcorder on standby when it's upside down and is presumed to have been left recording by accident.

The NV-GS500 would be a real winner if it had a headphone jack -- its audio meters and manual level controls are very advanced features for this category of camcorder. The Zoom Mic feature is of more dubious value -- no camera microphone can function well beyond a few feet from the subject.

On paper, the photo options of the NV-GS500 are impressive. By using pixel-shift technology, the three 1-megapixel chips can capture stills with as much as 4-megapixel resolution. While recording video to tape, you can simultaneously capture photos of as much as 1 megapixel to the SD card. There are several flash modes, a new widescreen aspect-ratio option, a self-timer, red-eye reduction and burst modes. Finally, the camera is PictBridge enabled, allowing it to be directly connected to appropriate printers.

The Panasonic NV-GS500 comes with MotionDV Studio 5.6LE for video editing as well as the more basic Quick Movie Magic, both for Windows.