Short first impression from GS200

[Yik Kuen]

Hi Meinolf,

The GS200 is not available in Malaysia and Singapore yet.
The top of the line 3CCD consumer camcorder is still the MX500 here in Singapore and Malaysia; not even the GS100.

For the consumer market here, Panasonic offers only GS70 and MX500.

Street prices in Singapore :

GS70K - S$ 1700 (RRP S$ 2099)
MX500 - S$ 2200 (RRP S$ 2499)

[Allan Rejoso]

I wonder what's keeping so long for Pany to ship out PAL units. I've seen the PAL model of the GS200 at LAOX duty free shop in Akihabara. Price is JPY120,000 duty free (for visitors); that's over JPY35,000 higher than the Jap model though.

[Meinolf Levermann]

Hi, I'm back from my business trip. And I was successful: Now I own a NV-GS200GC!

So the Cam is now available in Malaysia. I got it from "Billion Photo SDN SHD" in Plaza Jalan Bukit Bintang, 55100 K.L. for 3880 RM
which should be round about 870€.
If you see that the best price for the GS120 in germany actually is around 810 € and the Pana list price for the GS200 is 1498 € in germany (which is stupid, regarding the MX500), this was quite a good deal i guess :-)

The Cam is a PAL system Cam, and is fully compatibel to every TV and DV stuff i have here in germany at home.
The whole product is called NV-GS200GC, in germany the product is called NV-GS200EG.
The differences i can see till now are:
The manual languages are Chinese-English Russian-Arabian(i guess). The Network adapter comes with three different cables (instead of one in germany), one works in germany one in Malaysia and China and one i don't know.

So in the end i got more product for less money. And the pricing is obviously not following the high german PAL price list. It had followed the lower NTSC prices that you have in the US for that cam.

My impression of that cam: I really like it.
The Pictures are sharp, the colours are vivid.
The stills are not as good as from a Digicam, but good enough, to be noticed. And slightly better than from my MX300 and good enough to make 15x10mm prints from it (e.g. much better as every snapshot oneway cam, which sometimes is bought when you've forgotten your photo cam at home).

The cam starts up very fast, and with a quickstart function this can be accelerated to 1.7 second (might cost more energy).
My impression is that the low light pictures have a little bit too less blue (even after manual white balance, the colors are not so good than with my MX300), but they are not really bad in the end.

In my hotel room wich was 5m x 6m I've tried to make pictures at nigth. Only one light bulb with 50 Watts was burning.
The pictures looked a little bit darker than my personal visible impression was, but with +18dB they were satisfying me. Red, yellow and green looked not so bad (a little bit too much red), only blue looked a bit grey. The noise of those low light pictures was noticeble, but not dramatic, i can live with that.

The automatic program for "Candle light Conditions" generated a little bit brighter pictures than the+18dB setting, but with more noise also.
The MPEG4 movies at low ligth seem to be sligthly darker than the DV movies.

The image stabilizer stabelizes well. It is a EIS, so if it works, sharpness is slightly decreased during turns, which i could also see. If the light conditions are not sufficient, the EIS automatically goes off (a sign in the display indicates this). Bad jumping or shaking i could not observe untill now, even at 10x zoom.

The language in all menus is english.

If somebody can give me an email or ftp adress, i can send a few samples over, if there is some interest.

[Guy Bruner]

Meinolf,
You are welcome to post some pictures or video (<10 Meg, please) in the Members Album on my website. Just register, then go into the Members Album and create a 'nested album' to post into. You can edit properties to give it a name and description. You can also select the picture you want for the album cover. In the drop down list below the picture, select Highlight and it will make that picture the album cover (default is the first picture in the album).

[Allan Rejoso]

Hi Meinolf,

Could you kindly describe further how the video quality of the 200 compares with the 300 (clarity, sharpness, resolution, color accuracy, noise level, brightness) both in good light and low light? I'm really interested in one particular MX3000 unit. I know how the 200 video looks compared to the GS100 and MX5K but I haven't been able to hook a 300/3000 on a monitor. Many thanks!

Allan

[Yik Kuen]

Hi Meinolf,

Glad to hear that and congrats. Seems like the price in KL is very comparable to Spore's.

[Frank Granovski]

Allan, the MX3000 has the same playback resolution as the VX2000/PD150, but with richer color saturation. It requires more light, of course than the VX/PD.

[Allan Rejoso]

Problem is Jap sites don't usually provide resolution data. I've read somewhere that GS70 and GS200 have 500+ lines of resolution and I wouldn't argue others opinion/observations of the GS70/GS200 being sharp. But from my own tests, looking at GS200 video side by side with the likes of Sony and Canon's megapixels (that are equally sharp as the GS100 and MX5K), the discrepancy in sharpness and clarity is readily visible. Even my 10-year old daughter notices the difference right away.

[Frank Granovski]

Allan, VX2000/PD150 playback resolution via a wave-form monitor was done and published by a regular from DV Magazine. The article was called something like, "A second look at the VX2000." The MX300/MX3000 was tested by Pana Technical in Japan. I don't know about the GS200's resolution, but my guess would be that it's over 500 playback lines.

[Yik Kuen]

PV-GS70 has less than 500 lines of resolution as reported by Videomaker megazine.

However, the MX500 delivers 520+ lines

[Frank Granovski]

The GS70 has less video effective pixels than the GS200, that's probably why. 440K verses 290K.

[Allan Rejoso]

The MX5K and GS100 delivers approx. 540 lines according to Pany Japan (with or without OIS).

I don't think the GS200 has over 500 playback lines, but it's a good cam for its price nonetheless.

[Frank Granovski]

I bet the GS200 has at least 500 playback lines with DIS disengaged. Even with the MX300, the resolution is increased slightly with OIS disengaged. But with Pana's DIS off, there'd be more of an increase, like with the AG-EZ30U / PV-DV950.

[Allan Rejoso]

Alright then, well at least I now have a better idea what 20 or 40 plus lines of resolution look like :-))

So Frank the 3000 has 500+ playback lines too?

Out of topic, but the last 2 nights I've been watching some home videos I shot 10 years ago using my jurassic C-VHS Pany, some of them recorded under LP mode. 200-300 playback lines or what, it was FUN watching those old stuffs.

[Frank Granovski]

Yes, both the MX300 amd MX3000 have 500 horizontal line playback, but the MX300 (PAL) has more vertical resolution. The important thing is the horizontal resolution, because one eyes look horizontally more than vertically when viewing TV, and that's how lines are counted.