Is the panasonic GS500 a discontinued product and what is a better buy panasonic SDR-H200 or GS500?

Question

Is the panasonic GS500 a discontinued product and what is a better buy panasonic SDR-H200 or GS500?

Answer 1

I think the PV-GS500 is the better camera. It is miniDV tape based, so it will provide better quality video because is stores in DV format which has very little compression.

The SDRH200 is a hard drive based camcorder that stores in a pretty highly compressed MPEG2 format.

The GS500 has manual audio level control and 12x optical zoom and a 1/8" mic-in jack.

The SDRH200 10x optical zoom and no mic-in jack... so I did not even bother to check on manual audio control.

In video, compression = lost data = reduce quality. Take the lead from the pros - ALL of their camcorders store using DV or HDV. Mostly onto miniDV tape:

Canon GL2, XL2, XHA1

Sony HDR-FX1, FX7; HVR-A1U, V1U, Z1U

Panasonic HDX200, DVX100

The Panasonic HDX200 is an exception because it uses P2 cards and the Sony HVR-V1U has an optional external hard drive but neither use MPEG2 (or AVCHD)...