Quick Review Camcorders : Panasonic PV-GS2

Overall, video performance was very good for the PV-GS2’s price range. The camcorder scored better in this category than most of the other camcorders in its price range. Naturally, it excelled, relative to the competition, in all the categories which we value in color reproduction, crispness, balance, substantial saturation, and accuracy in spectrum and gray scale.

Automatic control on the Panasonic PV line is standard and in all respects average. There is an automatic mode as well as a manual mode, with a slide to designate. In automatic mode, the PV-GS2 offers a group of Program AE settings, or automatic exposure settings. These offers tailor the window of performance of the camcorder’s F-stop and shutter speed, to approximate, optimal shooting settings for specific environments. This is straight out of fifties America with options for snow and sun, beach, and twilight, landscape, and moon. Next year they’ll have settings for how best to shoot your son’s birthday (“birthday candle preset”).

The manual control of the Panasonic PV series is what sets it apart from other camcorders of similar price. Along the Program AE presets, the PV-GS2 offers manual shutter speed adjustment from 1/60 to 1/8000, manual exposure and gain control, which is a rarity for these cheap machines, as well as manual focus and white balance controls. The downside to these options is that they are all buried beneath the LCD and are operated using a cumbersome compass button. There is an astounding 22x zoom which is pretty cool.

Still JPEGs can be captured and recorded to SD card at a resolution of 640 x 480, which isn’t greater than the competition, but at least they’re not recorded to tape, an obsolete process.

Low light performance for the PV-GS2 is mediocre at best, and downright horrible when compared to more expensive machines. It suffers from common low light problems of significant increase in grain, washing of colors, and loss of crispness, but when compared to other camcorders in its price range, aside from the JVC GR-D33 naturally, the PV-GS2 remains par for the course.

The camcorder includes a 2.5 inch LCD screen with a black and white viewfinder. The LCD screen is of poor quality consistent with other Panasonics. The audio on the camcorder includes Panasonic’s nice zoom mic and wind noise reduction features as well as an A/V output that doubles as a headphone jack. There is no external mic input. Included ports are Firewire, A/V out/headphone, USB, and DC input. There is no widescreen mode for the PV-GS2, and the camcorder does not accommodate analog to digital pass-through.

While the PV-GS2’s relative wealth of manual control may be a deceiving siren song to the potential buyer, a closer look will reveal an island littered with mediocre available ports, no ability for analog to digital passthrough, just average low light performance, and low ease of use, and while he or she will shrink away from the forsaken isle in fervid derision, the price of the real estate may keep visitors returning to ol’ Pana.