Panasonic NV-GS250

Priced at nearly S$2,000, the Panasonic NV-GS250 is far from the cheapest consumer DV camcorder out there. And measuring roughly 81 x 73 x 144mm, it's also far from the most compact. But to the discriminating videographer, it offers a three-chip capture system and improved image stabilization whose advantages make it a winner.

Most video cameras geared toward general consumers have a single light-gathering CCD chip. Professional cameras, on the other hand, employ a prism behind the lens, which sends the red component of the image to one chip, the green to a second, and the blue to a third. Three-chip cameras generally produce images with richer colors and greater detail than do single-chip cameras, but they've been too expensive and bulky for home video use--until 2004, when Panasonic introduced a series of three-chip cameras priced and sized to compete with the one-chippers. The NV-GS250 represents the second generation of the company's consumer-oriented three-chip line, replacing the NV-GS200 in the middle of the series between the NV-GS150 and NV-GS400.

Design
Weighing a solid pound and clad in a lustrous silver metallic skin, the Panasonic NV-GS250 feels solid and well balanced in the hand. The body is oriented horizontally in a classic Handicam-style design rather than the vertical layout of many current consumer cameras. On the right side is a top-loading tape door under a hand strap; on the left, a 2.5-inch flip-out monitor sits above an SD/MMC card slot. The Leica Dicomar 10x zoom resides next to a stereo microphone and a flash on the front, and the battery snaps onto the camera under the viewfinder at the rear.

You can reach the basic controls with your right thumb. The joystick in the middle of the mode dial lets you make adjustments via the LCD menu.

Panasonic keeps physical controls to a minimum. In the LCD well, all you'll find is a FireWire port, an LCD power button, and a focus-mode switch.

The uncluttered design of the NV-GS250 has clearly been optimized for one-handed use with the camera set on automatic, and it is at its best when used this way. Just about all special features and manual controls are accessed through a navigation system controlled by a small joystick that rests under your thumb. This navigation system is very well organized and easy to use, but such menu-based setups are better suited for the occasional mode change than for the constant tweaking required to control a camera manually. While you can theoretically command just about every aspect of the NV-GS250 manually, doing so for any length of time quickly becomes frustratingly tedious. The only other significant controls are the smooth and well-placed manual focus ring and the mediocre zoom toggle, which has too short a throw to facilitate subtle zooming.

The NV-GS250 has the usual assortment of analog and digital ports: FireWire, USB, S-Video, and analog audio and video via RCA plugs. When not connected to a special RCA cable, the analog video port doubles as a headphone jack--a smart use of limited real estate. In addition, a microphone jack is available to connect a variety of external microphones, including the nifty Magic Wire Remote Control with Narration Mic, which is supplied with the camera. Finally, the NV-GS250 has an intelligent accessory shoe that can power an optional camera-mounted mic or light.

Features
What most sets the Panasonic NV-GS250 apart from the competition is what can't be seen from the outside, namely its three 1/6-inch 800,000-pixel CCDs, which offer 640,000-pixel effective resolution for video and 710,000-pixel effective resolution for stills. We'll discuss the impact of this three-chip design in the Image quality section.

The power switch, the zoom toggle, and the photo shutter-release button fall under your right index finger.

Although its chips are optimized for 4:3 shooting, the NV-GS250 offers two 16:9 shooting modes: An anamorphic squeeze that will fill a 16:9 television and a letterboxed wide screen for use on traditionally proportioned TVs. Unfortunately, no progressive video mode is offered to complete the "film look."

The Leica Dicomar lens offers a 10x zoom, which is fairly limited by contemporary standards. That's ameliorated somewhat by the wide end of the zoom, which is wider than much of the competition and may be more useful than a supertelephoto zoom. You can select 25x and 700x digital zoom options in the menu, but as is always the case with digital zoom, the image is extremely compromised when you apply them. More successful lens features are the excellent optical image stabilizer--inaccurately described as EIS in the menu--and the Tele-macro mode, which enables extreme close-ups of objects located about 16 inches from the camera.

The NV-GS250's menu system offers a typical selection of auto-exposure modes, including Sports, Portrait, Low Light, Spotlight, and Surf & Snow. The camera defaults to a generic auto mode, and you can also use the joystick-based navigation system to manually control every aspect of the image: shutter, iris, gain, and white balance. As noted in Design, while full manual control (excepting audio levels) is possible, on a practical level, the joystick-based navigation system isn't really up to the task.

You can choose from two low-light modes: MagicPix, which brightens the image by slowing the shutter down to 1/2 second, and 0 Lux MagicPix, in which, in addition to the 1/2-second shutter speed, the LCD screen cleverly doubles as an illuminator.

Other features include backlight compensation; fade to either black or white; Soft Skin, which reduces wrinkles by adding a slight blur to flesh tones; and QuickStart, a standby mode that saves batteries and can have the camera up and running in only a couple of seconds.

With regard to audio, the NV-GS250 offers a couple of cool-sounding features that don't work all that well, namely Zoom Mic, which is supposed to enable the audio perspective to change with the focal length of the lens, and Wind Cut, which cuts down on the low frequencies associated with wind noise. More successful is the very clever Magic Wire Remote Control with Narration Mic. This small wand serves not only as a handheld mic but also as a remote control, allowing you to control the camera while shooting yourself. If you're recording video with 12-bit audio, you can use the Magic Wire Remote to add a voiceover later.

The NV-GS250 can take stills at a variety of output resolutions, from 640 x 480 to 2,048 x 1,512. However, the higher resolutions are not native but are achieved via Panasonic's pixel-shift technology. The camera has a built-in flash for taking low-light photos. You can also capture stills without flash while you're recording video but at only 640 x 480 resolution. The RapidFire Consecutive PhotoShot mode lets you shoot a series of as many as 10 pictures at a rate of 2 frames per second.

Panasonic bundles the NV-GS250 with Motion DV Studio 5.1E LE for DV, a PC-based video-editing application.