Product Reviews

Most MiniDV cameras costing less than £1,000 use a single light sensor (called a CCD) to capture video. It's an effective system, but it's not ideal, as each pixel on the CCD only detects red, green or blue light. Professional DV cameras split the light in three directions, with three primary-coloured filters and three separate CCDs used to capture the image. This gives greater colour accuracy and sharper video.

Panasonic produces a number of low-cost triple-CCD MiniDV cameras, but at about £500, the NV-GS120B is the most affordable to date. We decided to find out whether or not it delivers the quality boost its specifications suggest, so we tested it against Canon's similarly-priced MVX250i, one of the runners-up in last month's DV camera labs. The MVX250i has a single CCD with a high

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1.3-megapixel resolution.

In outdoor tests the Panasonic immediately showed its superiority, displaying remarkably vibrant, natural colours and impeccable sharpness and detail. Extremely responsive automatic exposure handled transitions between dark and light subjects superbly. The Canon's outdoor footage wasn't quite as vibrant.

Indoors, the two were much harder to separate. The Panasonic's white balance was slightly better and its skin tones more flattering, but this time it was the Canon that produced more vibrant colours. Neither camera showed much image noise but, overall, the Canon came out on top for indoor filming. In very dark conditions the Panasonic has a mode in which the screen can be rotated by 180 degrees to use it as a makeshift lamp, but the results aren't up to much. The lamp built into the Canon camera is a better solution.

The Panasonic offers full control over focus, white balance, aperture and shutter speed, but using these features can be fiddly. The Panasonic can save a photo to SD card while recording video to tape, but its photo quality isn't a patch on the Canon's.

The NV-GS120B is capable of great moving images, but the Canon still beats it in low light. It would be great to see a camcorder that brought the true benefits of high-end triple-CCD technology to home users: the GS120 is good, but it doesn't quite manage it.