New toy

Well, I finally picked out and purchased a camcorder.  I ended up going with the Panasonic PV-GS200.  It’s last year’s model and I was just lucky enough to find a Circuit City that was selling their floor model (as they no longer carried the camera).  In reading many reviews on CamCorderInfo and DVSpot I came to the conclusion that Panasonic had some of the best camcorders in the $500-$1,000 range.  I started looking at several models and noted that the reviewers and comments were more happy with last years GS200 than this years GS250 (the successor).  I decided against springing for the GS400 (which apparently is out of stock everywhere anyway) since it had a lot more than I needed.  In the end, I picked up the GS200 at a discounted price and have played with it only a little.  I’m happy with the tape video quality, but the quality of recording to the SD card is not really all that good.  I don’t think I’ll be recording to the SD card much.  Of course, the image quality of the still shots is also somewhat poor compared to any decent digital still camera (but I didn’t buy the camcorder to take still shots). 

I choose to buy the GS200 over the GS150 (which was a hard decision) because the quality on the 200 is supposed to be a little better, the overall feel of the camera was nicer and more aesthetically pleasing.  Other considerations were the manual focus ring on the GS200 (clearly this should be on ALL camcorders, but isn’t) and the fact that some of the buttons on the back of the GS150 either required some longer fingers than I have to reach with my right hand, or were placed poorly.

I need to hook up the camcorder to my computer and pull the video over to see the quality there since I plan on really using the camcorder to capture video to burn to DVD for storage.  When I get that figured out and the process situated maybe I’ll post a clip or two.