Panasonic NV-MX500 vs Panasonic NV-GS300

[crisp4784]

Hey, I have the option to buy a Panasonic NV-MX500 (Panasonic PV-DV953) for pretty cheap from a mate and was wondering if i could get some opinions on that camera, and compare it to the GS300 or GS250, Could i get some opinions from some people? Thanks Crisp4784

[Chaoji3791]

I have the MX500 and it's a superb camera, although there were CCD faults with some batches. A couple of years after I bought mine, I was shooting a wedding and suddenly the picture went green and horrible. Fortunately, Panasonic fixed the problem for free because it was a known fault.

I don't know what the GS300 is like, but I do know that the lenses of Panasonic's 3CCD camcorders have been getting progressively smaller over the years, so the the newer 3CCD models have pretty ordinary picture quality. Lot of jaggy lines etc. The MX500 is one of the last 3CCD models Panny released with a decent-sized lens. Rule of thumb is that if the camera seems surprisingly tiny for a 3CCD camera, chances are the picture quality won't be all that good because of the small lens. I'm very happy with my MX500. It has real 16:9 with no resolution loss. I shoot in 16:9, deinterlace the footage in Magic Bullet and up-convert it to HD with Red Giant Instant HD and the results are stunning. Hope this helps.