I bought this MiniDV camcorder for my son for his second year of art school. He needed a camera that could do everything from reference shooting for animation work to delivering “near-broadcast quality” for live-action projects, such as music videos and short films. We did a lot of online research and narrowed it down to the Canon Elura 100 and the Panasonic PV-GS300 (panasonic.com, $600, $480 street).

The Elura is highly regarded as a cut-above consumer MiniDV in the under-$400 price range. What attracted us to the PV-GS300 was that, for the extra $100 or so, it offers features usually found in much more expensive professional cameras, the most significant of which is three CCDs instead of one. The CCD, or “Charge-Coupled Device,” is the light sensor package used in digital cameras. Professional video cameras have three CCDs, one for each color (blue, red, green), most consumer video cameras have only one CCD that handles all three colors, with a resulting lack of clarity, color saturation, and light intensity.

We’ve had the camera for nearly a year now and are really happy with it. It definitely delivers on the expectation that you’re getting professional camera features at a consumer price point. The image is sharp, the colors are vivid, the Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) gives you a very steady picture with hand-held operation, and you have a full set of manual controls, so you can tweak camera settings to your heart’s content (at least a consumer’s heart). Other features of note include a 10x optical zoom (700x digital), a 3.1-Megapixel still-camera mode, Web camera mode, 2.7″ LED display, both FireWire and USB 2 connectivity, and an SD Card slot. Battery life is rated at 2 hours. We haven’t done any clock testing, but our experience is that it may actually approach this in real-world situations (maybe 1-1/2 hours?).

So what’s NOT to like? A few things. One of the more significant omissions is that there’s no headphone jack on the camera (so you can’t listen to what you’re getting on the built-in stereo mic). There is a mic-in jack, which is nice, but the loss of the headphone jack (which was on the previous GS250 model) is clueless. There was also a manual focus ring on the GS250 which got dropped on the GS300, another significant feature loss. Another common complaint among some owners of the GS300 is the joystick control. Some users love it, others hate it. If you think this might be an issue for you (or your gift recipient), you might want to take it for a test drive at an electronics store to see if you’re comfortable with this method of mode/feature selection. We don’t find it as annoying as we thought we might, but YMMV.

In getting a three CCD camera, we thought it would do much better in low-light situations, thinking that more light sensors would mean more receptivity in less light. It apparently doesn’t work quite that way. Low-light performance is good, but not great. It can end up looking grainy. One tip we found online was to shoot in manual mode and adjust the gain down and shutter speed and then bring up the light level in post-production.

It really is amazing that a camera of this quality and feature-set can be had for as little as $480. If the Santa in your life is willing to spend this kind of dough, and you’re willing to put up with the few negatives described above, don’t be shy about asking him (or her) to toss a PV-GS300 down your chimney. On second thought, you may want to ask that it be lowered on a rope. A Panasonic Toughbook it ain’t.