Panasonic PV-GS83 Mini DV Camcorder Review

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Transcript of Featured Review

Hi Expo I'm reviewing the Panasonic PV-GS83. This camcorder is almost identical to the PV-GS85 only I believe it was only sold in certain stores and PV and shipped without a mini DV tape I believe and that's the only difference I'm pretty sure. This is a mini DV camcorder which means that it's digital but it doesn't record onto flash memory or a hard drive it uses digital tapes. It has a side opening mechanism you re mini DV tape just slide right into here ___ it goes back down you do like that. I definitely like this better than the tape compartment being on the bottom like some mini DV camcorders because with them if you are using a camera tripod you have to take your camera tripod attachment off the button before you can actually get to your tapes. But with this one you can have your tripod on all the time and then you can ___ to your tapes so that's one thing I like about. Oh navigation pretty is done with this switch right here you have your auto mode where you don't have to do anything really other than pressure cord pressure cord again to stop that's it. You have menu by flipping the switch farther over here and that allows you to do is that it allows you to use your joy stick right here for things like your shutter speed let's see white balance iris your shutter speed backlight all that good stuff if you want more vast controls you can do it with camcorder. Also if you had it on manual and you flip this switch this way it will ___ flip back and that will turn on manual focus mode. Now this doesn't have a focus ring up here or anything like that so you have to use your joy stick for manual focus and I never use menu focus because it so hard to get the focus right on using a joy stick. It just doesn't really work the auto focus works a lot better so I never use that mode. It has 2.7 inch wide screen monitor so if you're recording in the regular square aspect for a ratio your size are gonna chopped off so you will be recording on a square aspect ratio for regular TV. It has a video light not the brightness it's LED it's not the brightness but it's pretty bright. 32 times optical zoom a 1000 times digital zoom which really I won't use the digital zoom that much because it really gets fuzzy when you start zooming in that much with digital zoom. It also one of my favorite features on this camcorder is the optical image stabilizer very good for especially if you are older person with all your shaky hand. It has some can't explain it somehow the lens is on some kind of a stabilizer so if your hands is shaking just a little bit it cancels that out without decreasing your video quality even if your camcorder is a little shaky it's still appears very smooth and I've compared the difference using optical and no optical image stabilizer and it definitely looks at lot better. The screen swibbles can flip it over swibble if down like this. It has also has a SD card slot right here at the bottom so you can take pictures with this camera by pressing this button right here. But the picture quality is terrible it's not any better than the video quality well the video quality is okay but you definitely want your pictures to look at lot better than your video so I recommend buying a separate digital camera if that's what you want this video for. Overall a very good camcorder especially at the price tag of only 150 dollars you use on eBay I highly recommend this camcorder.