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.
