Panasonic PV-L859 Camcorder Review

by Robin Liss
Published on Jun 22, 2004 12:00 AM



The PV-L859 has an MSRP of $899.95. It is a VHSC camcorder with an extremely high optical zoom of 26x, a really high zoom for all camcorders, and a digital zoom of 150x. VHSC has both advantages and disadvantages. It is good because of the possibility to take the tape, put it into an adapter, and just slide it into your VCR. This way you do not have to plug cords into the camera and VCR. There are, however, many problems with VHSC that may steer some users away from investing in VHSC camcorders. VHSC tapes only provide you with 30 minutes of recording time at the highest quality, and 1 hour at a lower quality, which forces you to sacrifice quality for quantity. The picture quality is horrible with VHSC, at less than 200 lines of resolution. Some numbers, I have heard, are 120 lines of resolution, which is terrible resolution and the pictures a VHSC camcorder will produce are degraded. This camcorder adds a 4-inch LCD screen, which the earlier Panasonic model did not have. This camcorder also has a 480,000 pixel CCD that improves the image quality. This camcorder allows you to store digital pictures in the camcorder then hook it up to a computer to transfer the pictures.

The camera has a lot of neat features, like the Compact Flash Memory Card. It is a good camcorder with the features of a Digital Camcorder and the convenience of a VHSC camcorder.