Panasonic PV-GS180 Camcorder Review

Still Features (7.5)
The PV-GS180 (Review, Specs, $448.25) (Review, Specs, )’s still features are favorably comparable to other camcorders in its price range. Stills are captured to SD card (not included), which loads awkwardly into a slot below the LCD cavity. They can be captured at 640 x 480, 1280 x 960, and 1760 x 1320 in either normal or high quality. When in video mode, you can also capture stills to the card, but only at 640 x 480. The camcorder has neither a flash, nor does it take wide angle stills, both of which are features of the PV-GS300 (Review, Specs, $469.99).

Such large stills are possible from such small chips due to Panasonic’s Quad-Density Pixel Distribution. Pixel shifting is a type of interpolation in which an imaginary point between pixels is chosen and a light value is calculated based on adjacent pixel values. This is the same process that professional cameras use to increase resolution. It results is some pretty good looking pictures, but still not as good as a dedicated still camera would offer.

The still mode benefits enormously from the manual controls, which are carried over from the video mode. This includes aperture, gain, shutter speed, white balance, and focus, along with most of the automatic controls: backlight compensation, soft skin detail, telemacro and the Scene modes. Additional still functions include a timer (10-second delay) and RapidFire Consecutive Shot (640 x 480 only, up to 10 pictures at 0.5-second intervals).

Still playback is a simple operation, accessed by the mode dial surrounding the joystick. Stills take up the entire screen, and the joystick is used to advance, rewind, and begin or stop play of a slideshow.

Comparatively, the next model down, the PV-GS59 (Review, Specs, $297), can only take 640 x 480 in 4:3 aspect ratio. It does however, offer the 16:9 aspect still of 640 x 360, useful as a novelty and not much else. The Optura 50 (Specs, $449.99) can take great-looking1632 x 1224 stills without interpolation, thanks to its large 1/3.4” CCD. The Sony DCR-HC46 (Review, Specs, $419.99) takes stills up to 1152 x 864, though they are of poor quality.

Still Resolution (4.4)
The PV-GS180 was tested for the resolution of its stills by shooting a standard ISO 12233 resolution chart and running those stills through Imatest imaging software. At its best, shooting at 1760x 1320, the camcorder produced an approximate resolution of 441446.88.

As the chart below shows, the resolution score was lower than that of the PV-GS300, as the PV-GS300 is capable of capturing larger stills.

Still Performance (6.5)
With stills as large as 1760 x 1320, the PV-GS180 certainly seems to want to compete with your still camera. In reality, the three 1/6” CCDs can only produce an effective pixel count of 530K each. The 1760 x 1320 is larger than the native resolution, and is a result of Panasonic’s Quad-Density Pixel Distribution to appear larger (see the Still Features section above for further explanation).

From what we can see, the images look great. Even at its smallest, 640x 480, these stills are significantly better than those you’ll usually see from a camcorder. It looks very sharp, had no problem capturing the small details, and the noise was minimal. Color balance, which is typically the biggest problem with camcorder-generated stills, was surprisingly good. The greens were noticeably low, but overall, this is much more accurate than what we usually see.

Following the trend of video performance, the Panasonic PV-GS300 was much the same as the PV-GS180. The solid blue and red performance and lackluster green performance was also repeated here. The PV-GS59, with only one 1/6” chip, was darker overall, with a lot more noise and significantly poorer color performance. The gap in quality between the stills is as noticeable as it was in video performance.

The Sony DCR-HC46 had abysmal color performance, and rendered the stills nearly unusable. Almost duo-tone in a yellow-blue split, the picture was wrought with blue noise. Finally, the Canon Optura 50 had a slightly more even color balance than the PV-GS180, probably because the colors are equally muted, rather than just a weak green. The Canon had excellent fine detail capture, as well, even better than the PV-GS180.