Panasonic PV-GS320 3.1MP 3CCD MiniDV Camcorder with 10x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom

This is a great camera. I bought it a few months ago for an rv trip and the moment the battery was fully charged i hooked it up to the camera, put in a tape, and walked around the house experimenting. On the trip, it performed excellently. When properly exposed, the camera's three CCD chips reproduced colors surprisingly well. The microphone has a neat wind-cut function that works very well.

Pros
-great image and sound quality
-10x zoom
-color electronic view finder (which is becoming very rare in consumer camcorders now)
-very simple menu navigation
-photoshot feature
-nice joystick navigation for menus

Cons
-Poor low-light shooting
-no hot shoe
-no manual focus ring
-manual/auto switch inconviniently located
-no firewire input
-you have to remove the battery and go through a messy process to hook the camera up to a computer




I highly recommend this camera for beginners or even enthusiasts with a low budget.

I have the Panasonic PV-GS320 for about 3 weeks. Took it on a trip to get some practice with it. Easy to use and set up. Make sure you have an extra battery. The one that come with it is good for about 25-30 minutes.

Best results are outdoors and in bright light. It has a camera feature to allow still pictures to a 1 GB storage card, which is kind of neat. Cassette tape goes in and out easily.

Single worst feature is the lack of good quality sound. It has no audio jack, so the sound is a bit garbled if you don't speak loudly and into the mike. Otherwise, for the money, it is a good camcorder which is fun to use.

Most of the reviews on here are spot on, so I'll just go with what doesn't work that well and what I found to be a con to this camera.

And that is mainly that it's hard to pick up light while retaining image quality in darker places regardless of what settings are used. Also, I'm disappointed by the lack of external microphone jack, and, from what I've seen, the sound quality isn't of the highest quality.

In the end, I'll probably just use this for filming music videos.

I'd recommend this camera to those relatively new to film and just need something to get started out with that is of reasonable price. I got mine for $320.

I bought this camera as a semi-impulse buy because at the last minute I decided I needed a video of my wedding ceremony (we had skipped the videographer to save on cost). Besides a brief test, the first time this camera was used was at the wedding. It did a beautiful job. A friend (an amateur) taped the ceremony from about 40 feet away, and the picture and sound both came out very well. You can hear everything, the colors are crisp, the zoom works very well, and the whole thing just turned out beautifully. It was easy to figure out and use and I couldn't be happier with the result. It also downloaded easily to my iMac and works well with iMovie, although I had to buy a firewire cord to download (it comes with USB which only works with a PC). I got the firewire cord on Amazon for $14.

I just returned the Panasonic PV-320GS MiniDV Camcorder due to one devastating problem: the video quality is at issue when viewing on a 1080p LCD. The edges of everything stairstep badly. It appears like the picture on an old analog tv, dark lines between the lighted pixels. Very lo res. I guess I'll need to move up to an hd model.
I want to thank Amazon for having a good return policy, accepting the camcorder back for a full refund.