Analog-VHS-C Reviews

This Camera is great its got cool special effects great color great zoom Ive used it for countless movies like movies with like a story line and then some home movies. Its light long battery life has a when you shake like we all do when its filming it dappens it so its not as noticable that your not useing a tripod. If you have a video capture card itll be perfect to put on to your computer and edit. If you like makeing movies with plots, scipts, actors and so on this is the camera for you.

I have used this service about half a dozen times. Some tape conversions have been fine but others have been performed poorly. My most recent experience: Part of my two hour tape was not transferred. I had to return the tape to have the conversion redone and I enclosed a detailed letter explaining that only part of the tape was transferred to the DVD. The second transfer came back, with even less of the tape converted and misspellings in the custom description I supplied to be printed on the DVD and box. I assumed that an order being reprocessed would have received at least a little extra attention, not less.

I don't want to waste any more time having the conversion attempted for a third time and I would be extrememly nervous now about entrusting an irreplaceable tape to this company.

I wanted to find a service that was easy enough for my parents to use, and high enough quality that it would be worth the price and hassle. The options I found were a number of software products for the PC (too complex) and a few mail-in services like YesVideo that parse the videos into equally-timed chapters, which I thought would be annoying to view and search.

So I opted for YesVideo and ran a test. The test consisted of (holding my breath and) sending all 29 family videotapes we've recorded over the years of our kids growing up, and waiting to see what was returned. I did this without the knowledge of my spouse -- gambling with my life.

I was impressed and extremely satisfied with the result. The service was much faster than I anticipated (only a couple of days), and the quality was terrific. Video and audio both. The intelligent parsing of the footage is much appreciated -- we can skip over the embarrassing stuff (like me in a swim suit) and not have to search for our son's birthday or our daughter's first steps. The DVD case also has screenshots on the front that make searching a real cinch -- this is a big deal when looking through 29 volumes of video for the right moment in time.

On top of all this we got a photo CD with a bunch of digital photo-quality still images taken from the actual video footage. Not sure how they decide which ones to take, but it turned out a bit like a roll of film -- some good ones, some bad ones, and one or two that you want to put on your wall. Of course, they also returned the original videotapes, but I'm guessing the DVDs will outlast the originals anyway.

In the end, I surprised my spouse with the achievement of transferring all of our memories to DVD, and she was very pleased. (And I got doubles for my parents, which I'm saving for a Christmas present.) The test was a smashing success, and I'm going to recommend the service to everyone. It's a great service, and definitely worth the price. I don't know of any other reliable way to convert taped memories to DVD with such ease & efficiency. I give it 5 stars.

After crashing my PC six times trying to transfer my camcorder tapes to DVD, I found this mailer kit. It works like mail order photo processing -- just send in your videotape and a DVD comes back.

The DVD has a really cool feature in that there are pictures from the video that are used as a menu screen on the outside cover. This is great for reminding everyone what is on the videotape that has a title like "Summer 1998". There are also music videos on the DVD made from my own footage. This was interesting but I wish they were a little longer.

All in all, this is a great service at a great price. I wish I could get my money back for my fancy PC with its DVD drive.

The camcorder does not have the built-in SD drive, nor the digital still photo capabilities that are listed as included features in the product description.

It's all that except the picture in picture and image capture feature.

The PV-L424 is a pretty cool piece of gear. (With virtually no reviews)

We just got it yesterday for $419. It can be found a little cheaper, but check store reviews...

We almost bought the PCV-L552 for its big view finder and 27x optical zoom, but after a lot of digging on obscure web sites, we found that older camera suffers from a dew detector light that goes off too easily, shutting down the camera for hours. The PV-L424 just came out in 2004.

The 20x PV-L424 optical zoom is amazing. Things still look good at 40x digital, can read a UPC bar code from across the room. Things look tolerable at 120x, but ridiculous at 750k. There a single digit from the bar code fills the screen and is almost unreadable due to pixilation.

It's kind of slim, better looking than the photo.

Menus and controls seem intelligently laid out. What's used most seems to have a single button for it.

I like the way the LCD screen swivels around so that you could actually dictate into it and see yourself. It's smart enough to know to flip the image right side up when I do that.

I can't say anything yet for the durability.

We chose this VHS-C thing because I think all playback equipment for formats other than this and DVD will be difficult to find in 50 years. And the DVDs suffer from $10 disk costs (for 30 minutes) and the resolution won't match the MiniDVs until they change the image format to MPEG2. The PV-L424 seems like a great inexpensive holdover until the DVDs mature.

I purchased this model in March 2002 and in May 2003 - it just quit working! I thought the battery had run out - recharged it -nothing! Bought a new battery - still nothing. All it'll do now is make a click noise when you switch to camera or vcr. Cant even get my tape out of the damn thing now! Call Panasonic - what a joke! They wanted $149.00 for a diagnostic test and $102.00 service charge - I only paid about $300 for it new. I'll never buy another panasonic again - the service was terrible and they are not helpful AT ALL! Good luck if you buy one - get the extended warranty! They should sell them for $50.00 and just make them disposable!

I purchased one of these last year and although I can't complain about the quality of the picture, the service from Panasonic leaves a whole lot to be desired.

My camcorder was accidently bumped about 8 months after I purchased it which caused the deck assembly and loading assembly to become unworkable. Even though the fault was mine, Panasonic doesn't seem to want you to have their products repaired, they would rather you buy another one, as the repair technician stated to me. The parts cost more than the camcorder did new.

Needless to say I will never buy another Panasonic product again and neither will my friends and family.

I baught this camera around october and it is now august, and for some odd reason a couple weeks ago, it broke. i have no idea why, i wasn't being rough with it or anything, i'm sure i didn't bang it.

for one, the loading part would'nt work but my dad somehow managed to shove the tape in (i have no clue how because he can't do it anymore) and when he did it wouldn't record, play, or anything else!

other than the fact that, its a nice camera.