hi all,

The only thing stopping me to spend money on the GS500 is the acclaimed "lack of manual controls"

however, i just downloaded the operating manual and in it, it describes how to operate it in FULLY MANUAL control over IRIS and SHUTTER SPEED!

only thing is it cannot be done on the camera physical controls but in the menus .

i think i want to share this with many people here because having those controls on the physical is really not that important to me as long as I can fully manual control somehow, its just about getting used to the camera.

I will buy one next year and not saving up for the DVX100 for my short films now.

That's right. Although the automatic controls are ok.

I think that IRIS and SHUTTER SPEED should be camera physical controls instead of sitting in the menus.

I am constantly adjusting brightness in the gs400 menu and I hate it. I really wish that Panasonic put brightness as a physical control. Simply gs400 does not have enough physical controls. Should have three separated rings instead of using buttons to switch.

Ah, there's manual control and imagined manual control ...

The GS range has internal (undocumented) neutral density filters. If you film in the auto mode the camera will stop down to about f/4.5, then - if it gets brighter it will keep adding to the internal ND and generally won't stop down further.

If you shoot in manual and keep dialing in a smaller and smaller aperture, the camera does exactly the same thing. It stops down to f/4.5, stops there, and more and more ND is applied. If you rewind the tape, push 'play' and turn on the display, you'll see it says you shot the sequence in bright light at f/16 or even f/22.

Nonsence of course, diffraction losses would make the footage unuseably blurry. Panasonic are simply giving you an extrapolated aperture reading that is a direct correlation of the amount of ND that's been added without your knowing.

The DVX100 is something else entirely. It has full manual control over gain, ND, aperture and shutter speed - what every photographer wants.

tom.