I've been lurking here for a couple of months and have learned a lot. Now I'm going to buy my first mini dv cam, and I have decided to buy a Panasonic PV-DV953. I'm going to NC to visit my brother, so the first thing on my list will be a B&H cam order. Thanks everyone!

Good for you. Let us know how you like your new cam when you get it!

Hello, and welcome. I see you live in Vancouver as well. We have lots of Vancouverites here. Have a good trip---North Carolina? Never been there but I've heard their beaches are nice. Good choice. I just looked a 953 over the other day.

The 953 (if exactly the same as the MX500, except for NTSC-
PAL) will be a great cam, and being a first time user, you'll be extremely pleased with the colours and the features.

Happy shooting.

You'll definitely be happy with the DV953. I took mine to an air show yesterday and even though we had an overcast I got some really good footage.

Here are some frame grabs. They are 16:9 mode, frame mode, 1/500 shutter (or higher), and unfortunately most are using digital zoom and are not manually white balanced. They are also highly compressed for fast loading on my photo hosting site.


http://image1ex.villagephotos.com/pubimage.asp?id_=2351224

http://image1ex.villagephotos.com/pubimage.asp?id_=2351225

http://image1ex.villagephotos.com/pubimage.asp?id_=2351228

http://image1ex.villagephotos.com/pubimage.asp?id_=2351230

Thank you, Mr. Haupfear. Your pictures are interesting. I am already 100 percent convinced to go with the Panasonic PV-DV953. I leave May 8th for my 3 week visit to North Carolina, and I will be ordering this camcorder in a few days. I've read what the gods (wranglers) wrote and the angels (members) wrote for a couple of months. I must have read hundreds of posts. One thing puzzles me, what is a dork black? Does this mean the blacks in the video are super black? It doesn't matter really, or maybe this does with camcorders? Perhaps the word dork was misspelled and should have been dark?

Haha. Thats something Frank made up, dork blacks. It's just because of some guy that used a MX8 (dv852) said something one time about his photos having dark blacks, and one time he mispelled dark, dork, and Frank caught it...

Alex, Thank you very much for clearing that up for me. It's nice to see an intelligent sense of humour on this board.

I just noticed, I am a new boot. Why am I only a new boot? I should be at least a new fur coat!

Karen,
The "New Boot" title is certainly not a reflection of fashion preference <g>. It's automatically assigned by our forum software based on your number of posts:

Tourist (Minimum Posts: 0) New Boot (Minimum Posts: 3) Regular Crew (Minimum Posts: 20) Major Player (Minimum Posts: 100) Trustee (Minimum Posts: 200) Inner Circle (Minimum Posts: 300)

North Carolina is the best! Thats where I live. We have the great mountains 3 hours west and the beautiful beaches 2.5 hours to the east. You cant ask for anymore than that. Except maybe time off work to enjoy them. :(