In addition to being easily portable, with no dimension exceeding 126mm, the Panasonic NV-GS200 is comfortable to hold and maneuver for long periods of time. At 470 grams, it's fairly light, and its basic automatic and manual controls are well placed. The icons that identify them are understandable, not just cute, and the LCD menus are bright and easy to read. Sometimes the LCD menu system can be cryptic, especially to a novice. Pray that you won't have to count on the user manual for help -- it's a labyrinthine mess of poorly organised information.
The Panasonic NV-GS200 packs an impressively rich feature set for a camera at its price point. It sports an f/1.8 10X Leica Dicomar zoom lens, and you can manually set aperture, shutter speed, and white balance. An SD card slot is tucked neatly behind the LCD screen for recording stills and MPEG-4 video. You'll need to buy your own card, though, since the puny 8MB one that's included won't hold much. While Panasonic touts this camera's 2.3-megapixel still capture, that resolution is achieved through what the company calls quad-density pixel distribution technology. The result is mediocre photos that may make fine mementos but can't compare in quality to what you'd get from a decent dedicated still camera.
The autofocus, zoom, and manual controls are extremely responsive and smooth. On the other hand, the electronic image stabilisation is the NV-GS200's Achilles' heel. Cameras this compact lend themselves easily to wobbly footage, so image stabilisation is extremely important -- but the NV-GS200's system often left noticeable trails and generally didn't take enough of the shake out of our images. That's a shame, and it cost the Panasonic an Editors' Choice award. On the other hand, the moderate-size 2.5-inch LCD is bright and sharp, as is the colour viewfinder.
Thanks to the three CCDs, the Panasonic NV-GS200 easily takes wonderfully vivid footage with excellent colour rendition -- in good exposure situations, that is. Dim scenes yielded noticeably noisy results. The MagicPix setting, which allows the NV-GS200 to take footage in no-light situations, seems like a great idea in theory, but don't rely on it in practice. Although this Panasonic has three CCDs, they're small 1/6-inch sensors, so you won't get the kind of detail that a prosumer model with larger CCDs would provide. Nevertheless, the footage we captured was excellent -- if a little too shaky when zoomed in -- coming from a consumer camcorder.
Editor's note: The Panasonic NV-GS200 is known as the Panasonic PV-GS200 in the US. .
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