Panasonic VDR-M53 Camcorder Review

Video Performance (6.5)
The VDR-M53 is equipped with a 1/6”, 680K CCD. This CCD has 340K effective pixels for both video and still capture. Panasonic’s VDR-M50 of last year had similar imaging specs and did okay, not as well as last year’s Hitachis, but good, especially compared to last year’s Sonys.

At 3000 lux, the VDR-M53 does really well. It shows good colors with incredible crispness. The magenta tile looks kinda odd, different that the color usually represented on camcorders. The image is equal to the VDR-M75 in nearly every criteria, with the VDR-M75 perhaps a tad crisper. But, overall, the better imager of the VDR-M75 only really comes into play in lower light environments. Compared to last year’s VDR-M50, the VDR-M53 produces better, crisper, richer colors in bright light.

Compared to some MiniDV camcorders the VDR-M53 does surprisingly well in bright light environments, though not so much in the low. It produces video at 3000 lux on par with the PV-GS35 and the DCR-HC32, easily.

Video Resolution (10.5)
In order to calculate the VDR-M53’s video resolution, footage was taken of a standard resolution chart, and stills from this video were exported to Imatest Imaging Software. At its best, the camcorder produced approximately 367.5 lines of horizontal resolution, and 286.3 lines of vertical resolution, yielding a resolution of 105215.25 (0.105 MP).

Still Performance(6.0)
Still performance on the VDR-M53 is excellent. Its colors are brilliant, deep, and rich, even compared to some 3 chip camcorders, including Panasonics. In fact, the VDR-M53’s brilliant gray scale is much more brilliant than the DCR-PC1000’s. And, furthermore, there isn’t much of a difference between the spectra of the PV-GS250 and the VDR-M53 aside from the three-chip's superior crispness. However, the VDR-M53 does show some significant blue noise in the violet/blue side of the spectrum. Usually, we've only seen this noise on certain Sony camcorders. Looks like it's spreading.

Still Resolution(3.46)
The Panasonic VDR-M53 can capture stills onto SD card and DVD discs at 640 x 480. Exporting stills from a standard resolution chart allowed us to test the camcorder’s still resolution. At its best, the VDR-M53 generated 346800 (0.346 MP) lines of still resolution.

Low-Light Performance(3.0)
The low light performance of the VDR-M53 is quite disappointing. We tested the camcorder at our regular light levels of 60 and 15 lux. Sixty lux is the approximate equivalent of a slightly dimmed indoor office, by no mean indiscernible to the human eye. Fifteen lux is definitely darker though still within range of the manufacturer’s acceptable illumination and very much accessible to the human eye.

While at sixty lux, the VDR-M53 produced video that slightly darker than last year’s VDR-M50 results, its colors were crisper and more balanced. There was some nasty noise in the magenta tile at sixty lux, but the main problem occurs at 15 lux. At 15 lux the camcorder loses almost all of its color information, and while it does show a dramatic reduction of noise from last year’s model, both images are really unusable.

 Also, at these lower light levels, the improved CCD of the VDR-M75 comes into play giving this more advanced camcorder the edge at both 60 and 15 lux, where it is able to retain some color information. Both camcorders have equal amounts of noise.

Compared to some MiniDV camcorders, the VDR-M53 cannot compete as well as it did at brighter light levels. While it maintains lower noise levels than some of these camcorders, it also severely suffers in the noise department.

Wide Angle(8.4)
The Panasonic VDR-M53 produced a wide angle measurement of 42 degrees with the zoom pulled completely out.

LCD 4:3 standard aspect