I recently got myself a Panasonic NV-GX7 (early christmas pressie)

I'm not very impressed with the quality of the video taken so far - it seems very grainy compared with my old VHS-C.

I assume it is due to the poor light levels we've had in the UK this past week or two - is this graininess normal for digital video?

The still images are also not quite up to the standard I was expecting for 1.2mpixel - I've seen better at the same resolution.
(they also came out very dark and needed a lot of manipulation)

I'm still experimenting, the manual is less than helpful and not very readable in a lot of areas (translated directly from japanese?)


Regards

Paul

[Scooby Doo]

I am also very interested in this camcorder. The others being the Sony TRV25 and the Canon MV550i. For a complete novice like me which is the best buy overall. Or would something cheaper be just as good?

It must be something wrong.....
Pany miniDVs have very good picture in general!..

You Can Not compare it with VHS C !Thats for sure!

Lighting is very important!

I'll give it another go in lighter conditions - today would have been good if I was not at work.
The paper yesterday said it has been the darkest december in London since 1909 - 11 hours of sun till a few days ago.

I really like the camera itself, it is tiny, light and has orifices all over for connecting to just about anything - and it has about a million functions with the built in SD card for photos/mpeg etc.

I suppose I should try and make more sense of the rather flimsy and poor manual...

Cheers,

Paul

[gmm]

About the still pictures -

You are not going to get the best results with a camcorder. I was a bit disappointed with my MX8(1280x960 res). The results i get from 640x480 are very good though(Clear,Colours are very good) and also resizing the larger size images(1280x960 to 1024x768 or 800x600) are good.

It would have been nice to have more choice of resolutions though. I only have 1280x960 and 640x480.

Paul (decapod),

I recently got myself an early Christmas pressie in the form of a Panasonic NV-GS5B and I too am a bit disappointed in its performance in the absence of a megawatt of additional lighting (and I guess the stills are even more worse than the ones you get with your megapixel CCD).

My cam has a 30 day money back guarantee and I was thinking of moving up to the NV-GX7. Maybe not from what you say.

Have you had any more joy with low light filming (using manual apperture controls for example)?

Cheers,

Mike.

I recently bought an Canon MV-500i and was quite disappointed in the quality, and as such was thinking of upgrading to the Panasonic GX7, but after reading your comments it seems it's not as good as I hoped. I just don't understand why so many of these camcorders seem to fail in low light and everyone appears to have this 'well what do you expect?' attitude. For £800 i'd expect a quality that doesn't look like it was filmed in a sandpit. Besides, this is England - when do we ever see much light? So now I don't know what to do, I guess the Panny must at least be a bit better than the MV500, but I'm wondering if the quality is going to be a significant improvement to justify the extra money I'd have to shell out.

It definitely does work much better with a good light level, but my old VHS-C (also Panasonic) has much better quality in low light.

I think Panasonic want you to buy the video flash attachment that fits on top (probably doubles the weight, eats the battery and costs as much as the cam)

As for the 1.2Mpixel pictures - you need to resize them by 50% to get good quality there, they are also quite dark. However it is still an extremely useful feature.

I've not had any problems with the PC connections USB/AV, but don't have the equipment to try the DV connection.

On the whole, I'm not too disatisfied - all my home video will just have to be sunny

Paul