I got the camcorder, took it home, charged the battery, and started to experiment with it. Seemed fine at first. I was happy with it. The next day, (or the day after, maybe) I noticed a noise that happened while I was recording that sounded annoying. I took the camcorder to a concert to record a band and the tape seemed to drag. I popped the tape into one of the Playpak adapters (whatever you call them) to watch the video on the living room TV and noticed that the sound quality wasn't so great, and neither was the video quality. I don't know if this is just a bad-quality camcorder in all, or if I just happened to buy a bad one. My advice is to research everything you can before getting one of these. Try out others, whatever you want/need to do, but I, personally, do not recommend this camcorder to anyone. The tape seemed to drag, the video quality wasn't that great, the sound quality was pretty poor. The built in microphone, to me, seemed a little too sensitive. Now one thing I realized is that I had the video mode in SLP (super long play) so that the tape would last longer, which sacrifices some of the quality of the video and sound, but that shouldn't cause the tape to drag. And the microphone just seemed a little too sensitive, to me. I don't really recommend this camcorder. Maybe I just happened to pick up a bad one but if they're all like the one I bought, I definately do NOT recommend this one.

My wife purchased the camcorder for our trip to Europe. I'm 60 and have never used a camcorder. I prefer still pictures. I tried the video and the pictures and sound were crisp and true. The still pictures were very good. I found the camcorder easy to use and it gave good results for a new video maker. I would recommend buying it.

I had bought this camera at sears a few years ago. it works pretty good, i have never had a problem with weird noise, or bad picture or anything, the only bummer is if you want a camera that is easy to be able to transfer your video to disk, then this is not the camera for you, but if you prefer tapes its pretty good, and you can get the tapes from wal-mart, so all in all its a fairly good camera.

I have purchased this handycam and I find that the videos/picts cannot be loaded onto the system (p.c) through the usb port.When I asked the seller (I am in India,as is the seller) about it,he said that a "DIGITAL POWERSHOT DISKETTE FOR PANASONIC PVL 453.?Could anyone let me know if such a thing is available in the U.S?If so how do I procure it?
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br /Thank you
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br /Regards
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br /Phanindra