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Great Camera!
I use this camera for community tv production. I find it reliable and easy to use. It has good "low lux" sensing and performs excellent in studio and field shoots. I've acutally (I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS) dropped this camera from shoulder height, and it suffered no internal damage. It has a little bruise on the top of the case, but that's all the damage I can find. That incident was in August 2009, and the camera still works flawlessly. As most of you know, I do not recommend using Sony tapes with this camera. Most of you understand that you cannot mix Sony and JVC/Panasonic tapes due to the differences in lubrication used on the tapes. Make sure you get a good tripod for this camera; It will thank you for it later. One FINAL warning, throw away the strap that comes with the camera. It may cause the camera to slip of your shoulder. If I had the money, I would own three Panasonic DVC20s. I bought the optional six hour battery. It has never disappointed me. Some ads don't mention it, but the camera comes with two (2 hour) batteries.


sj

Panasonic PV-GS90 Camcorder Review
Panasonic PV-GS90 MiniDV Camcorder with 42x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom
I have purchased the Panasonic PV-GS90 from Big Value Inc. through amazon.com and the product is pretty good for the price. I have had Panasonic Camcorder (the PV type) before. If you are a MiniDV tape fan, this product is a good choice. Like other reviews, I expects this product to perform minimum picture quality when taping inside my house. I was right! The in-house picture was grainy, because there was not enough lighting inside the house. I was not upset because I expected this problem to happen. You can try to have more lighting inside your house when recording. Maybe that would fix the grainy pictures problem. For a little over 0.00, this product is supper. Out-door taping is excellent for the price, once again. I love miniDV tape because the movement of objects I am taping is recorded clearly, not jerky like other memory-card camcorder or DVD camcorder producing. I have never seen the quality of hard-drive camcorder; I imagine it would not product jerky movement of object when recording, but the price of hard-drive camcorder is too high for my checkbook. Overall, Big Value Inc. delivered what it promised and I am happy with my purchase.

Good Value for the Money but Lacks Some Features
I bought this camcorder for my wife for Christmas in 2008 to replace an old tape-based camcorder than was 5 years old. This one is much smaller (fits perfectly in an adult-sized hand) and represents a good value for the money. However, the picture quality of the still shots was a little disappointing and the video could be sharper. But considering it was half the cost of a comparable Hi-Def unit, that's to be expected. I was also surprised that it doesn't have a built-in light for shooting in low-light areas. Even our old camcorder had a light and I might not have purchased this unit had I known this prior to placing the order.

The 60GB internal HDD works great and even after 9 months of usage, we only managed to fill up 5% of the drive.

Lastly, I installed the included software recently only to find that it does not work with Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit. Not a deal-breaker, because there's lot of other better alternatives, but I thought I should mention it for prospective buyers. Also, Panasonic might offer a new version that's compatible with Windows 7 in the future. Obviously, prices for similar Hi-Def camcorders have dropped considerably since I purchased this almost a year ago and that makes them even more attractive. This is a good camcorder for the price-point, but just be aware of what you're paying for.

Excellent all-around camcorder
I've used this camera for 3 years and it has not failed me. With its 3 ccd chips, picture quality is outstanding. The ability to save presets is practical, and the camcorder offers multifarious choices for the versatile types of shots one would like to achieve. It is perfect for some higher quality filmmaking, which is what I used it for. If you don't believe me, watch a film I've made with it: [...]
The film also shows decent performance in lower light situations by the dvx.
I'm moving on to hd, but I really don't think there are better sd cameras out there that offer true 24p/30p at such high quality picture. The only possibly negative thing is the mic, but almost all internal mics on camcorders aren't that good anyway.
Overall, highly recommended. Excellent gains for the price.

Okay but flawed camera
For its relatively inexpensive price you get a decent enough, fairly easy-to-use hard disc & SD camera. For me the pro's are its fairly compact size, good battery life, better sound quality than expected and a hard disc with sufficient capacity (40GB). Biggest cons are its fairly poor (though still acceptable) image quality in dark environments, not-so-convenient controls for playback/editing on the camera itself, and the appalling software that's included. If you shoot in 16:9 aspect ratio, you'll need to re-convert all your videos since the software stretches your image to 4:3 whether you like it or not. Luckily there's a free little tool called SDCopy that can fix your image back to normal, but it takes effort & time.
All in all I think it's a fairly useful camera, but I wouldn't buy it again. I'm sure there are better alternatives out there.