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Wonderful and simple
By: Romy Kom
April 24, 2007 @ 2:07 PM
A month of GS 500 (romy kom – 4/9/07)
I reside in South Africa; I have been involved in photo and video for a very long time. I loved the photo quality I could get from reflex cameras. Videography had always been a point-and-shoot affair.
I am what I consider advanced amateur. I am a Cameroonian doctor by profession but I spent a bit of time filming and editing from birthdays, parties and even weddings.
I previously owned a canon Hi8 and then the Sony hc32. Despite the good overall performance, I was always frustrated of the inability to control anything.
It was then with great interest I discovered the Panasonic 3ccd lines. I initially wanted to purchase the GS400 but the price tag (ZAR12000) was prohibited.
I bought the GS500 for a bargain at a local shore. I still wander how they could sell it cheaper than the local Panasonic dealer. Anyway…
This camera is bigger than anyone I had used before but it is surprisingly light. After putting the grip into place, it fits quite well in my big hands. I nevertheless struggle to reach comfortably all the buttons on the top right. The build quality of the camera seems as good as the reviews note.
One can start shooting videos without any deep reading of the manual. With this camera though one would be missing on all the added features like the choice in the video size 4/3, 16/9 or ProCinema. I tried the ProCinema mode for the first days but seriously I couldn’t see the difference with the 16/9 mode. The colors are just brilliant in all modes with a tendency to over saturation: a dull red seems strawberry colored. There seems to be too much brightness also on the final product; but in all fairness this can be adjusted with the manual settings. This said, it is a bit unfair to criticize at this point as I am still bound to get better with the manual controls.
At night, the low light feature works as long as there is some light. Colors appear more natural. But because of the very low shutter speed, animated objects appear ghost-like. It would have been great to have the infrared feature of the Sony’s even though objects appear black and white.
I still don’t get it, the lack of headphones on such a high-end camera. There is manual audio control on the camcorder but so far I feel it better to be set on auto.
The software’s that come with the camera are completely worthless for me: very limited for video editing and no DVD output.
Another disappointing fact here is the short battery time around 1h10 of intermittent recording. I am planning to buy a bigger one.
Otherwise the sound quality is very good, the manual focusing satisfactory and the Leica lens majestuous.
I love this camcorder and soon will be using it for a documentary about health problems in my local community
Rating: 8 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful. Was this user review helpful? Yes | No