The second Panasonic submitted, the PT-LC76E rated higher than its sister model -- with even better performance for both office and home real world tests - and came only second to the Hitachi CPS210 overall.

If the CCD is the brain of a digital video camera it is logical that three should be better than one. A single CCD has to deal with all colours together while a 3-CCD system divides the primary red, green and blue (RGB) colours to individual CCDs to give a much more precise and accurate picture. The result is a high quality image that is as good as any of the cameras tested - including the Sony DVD201E, which provided the benchmark for most of the others.

At just on $4,400, the 500A cannot really be considered a consumer DV camera, however, it is no doubt a camera a lot of consumers would like to own. However, the price and some annoying little problems stopped this camera from being the Labs Winner this month.

Panasonic claims this to be the world's smallest palm-type DV camera, and who am I to argue?