Panasonic PV-DV852 Camcorder Review

by Robin Liss
Published on Jun 4, 2002 12:00 AM



The Panasonic PV-DV852 is one of Panasonic's high end MiniDV camcorders. The PV-DV852 has an MSRP of $1599 and a street price around $1100 and offers excellent picture quality.

The Panasonic PV-DV852 has a LEICA DICOMAR Lens and a 1/3.8 in. Mega Pixel CCD. The PV-DV852 has a 10x optical, 200x digital zoom and a 3.5 in. LCD screen. The PV-DV852 also has a color viewfinder. A great feature of the Panasonic PV-DV852 is the Optical Image stabilization which contributes to the great video quality of the PV-DV852.

The PV-DV852 has a manual focus ring for controlling the focus, this is a great feature and I wish Panasonic included it on all of their camcorders. The PV-DV852 also has manual exposure (Iris), white balance and shutter speed, all of which are accessed through the menu system. With a range of 1/60th of a second to 1/8000th of a second.

The still performance of the PV-DV852 is pretty good, offering 1280 x 960 resolution stills. Interestingly, the camcorder produces worse resolution stills than the much cheaper Panasonic PV-DV702. The camcorder saves the stills to SD cards, and Panasonic included an 8MB SD card with the camcorder. Stills are transferred from the camcorder to the computer using USB. A still feature that the PV-DV852 has over the PV-DV702 is that it has a pop-up flash which is pretty useful.

The PV-DV852 has a Firewire IEEE 1394 port for transferring video from the camcorder to the computer. The PV-DV852 also has headphone and microphone ports. The camcorder has S-Video in and out.

You can record MPEG4 video to the SD card. The length is only limited by the size of SD card. You can fit 6 minutes on the included 8MB card. The camcorder can also record just plain audio onto the SD cards. Like the MPEG4 recording, the length is only limited by the size of the SD card. You can fit 25 minutes of audio on the included 8MB card. Another neat feature on the PV-DV852 is an audio dubbing mode (only with SP video) which allows you to re-record the audio over pre-recorded video. You can also use the PV-DV852 as webcam using the USB port. Working with Microsoft NetMeeting or similar web cam software, the PV-DV852 can be hooked up to a computer to use it as web cam or a videophone.

In addition, the PV-DV852 includes a remote to control recording and playback functions. The camcorder also includes ArcSoft photo editing software. The PV-DV852 also has digital pass-through which means you can use the camcorder as an on the fly converter of analog video to digital video.

The PV-DV852 produces really great looking video. The optical image stabilization is a great feature. I like the PV-DV852, and it is a much more professional camcorder when compared to the PV-DV702, and produces a much better image. Although the still resolution is less, I think that the improved picture quality is more important. I like the PV-DV852 a lot and think it's a good choice.