Panasonic PV-DV952 Camcorder Review

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



The Panasonic PV-DV952 is Panasonic's high end consumer camcorder with 3 CCDs. The PV-DV952 has an MSRP of $2299.95 and a street price around $1500 and offers excellent picture quality.

The Panasonic PV-DV952 has a LEICA DICOMAR Lens and three CCDs. The PV-DV952 has a 10x optical, 120x digital zoom and a 3.5 in. LCD screen. The PV-DV952 also has a color viewfinder. A great feature of the Panasonic PV-DV952 is the Optical Image stabilization which contributes to the great video quality of the PV-DV952.

The PV-DV952 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-DV952 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-DV952 is pretty good, offering 1200 x 900 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 16MB SD card with the camcorder. Stills are transferred from the camcorder to the computer using USB. A still feature that the PV-DV952 has over the PV-DV702 is that it has a pop-up flash which is pretty useful.

The PV-DV952 has a Firewire IEEE 1394 port for transferring video from the camcorder to the computer. The PV-DV952 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 12 minutes on the included 16MB 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 50 minutes of audio on the included 16MB card. Another neat feature on the PV-DV952 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-DV952 as webcam using the USB port. Working with Microsoft NetMeeting or similar web cam software, the PV-DV952 can be hooked up to a computer to use it as web cam or a videophone.

In addition, the PV-DV952 includes a remote to control recording and playback functions. The camcorder also includes ArcSoft photo editing software. The PV-DV952 also has digital pass-through which means you can use the camcorder as an on the fly converter of analog video to digital video.

Because the PV-DV952 is 3 CCD's it will ultimately be compared to the Sony VX2000 and the Canon GL1. I did not do a side by side comparison, however I can confidently say that although the price is up there, the video quality is noticeable worse in my opinion than both the VX2000 and the GL1. The colors were not as well defined. The PV-DV952 however does produce an excellent quality image, and it's one of the cheapest 3 CCD camcorders available. It's certainly the best image of any Panasonic camcorder and will beat most other 1 CCD camcorders. If you're looking for high video quality and 3 CCDs at a low price the PV-DV952 is a great choice.