Product brief: March

by Jim Martin , Nick Ross , Dave Stephenson on Mar 1, 2007

Brief reviews of new products, plus updates on items we've already featured.

Panasonic NV-GS180

PRICE $798 SUPPLIER www.surpass.com.au INTERNET www.westerndigital.com

The NV-GS180 cost around $200 more when it first hit the streets. Even then, it was the cheapest, three-CCD camcorder on the market. But now its lower price makes for an even more promising package. The NV-GS180 is based around a trio of 1/6in 800,000-pixel CCDs, which are ganged together for still images at 1760 x 1320. It doesn’t have a built-in flash but, despite its low price, the NV-GS180 boasts mic and headphone jacks with an accessory shoe. Tapes load from the top too.

The plethora of features extends to a comprehensive range of manual controls. Aside from the five auto-exposure modes, you can manually adjust the shutter from 1/50th to 1/8000th of a second, aperture from f/1.8 to f/16, and video gain from 0-18dB. However, we don’t like the fact that the menu joystick is also used for manual focusing, as no lens ring is provided.

With the three CCDs, the NV-GS180’s colour performance in good outdoor lighting was nothing short of exceptional. Colours were spot on and the image sharp. Under worse illumination, colour fidelity was still good and with some additional video gain, even better. In really low light, camcorders with larger, single CCDs can be better, though.

But considering its reduced price, the NV-GS180 provides an unbeatable combination of video quality and features for the hobbyist. It also offered the only credible still-image performance this month. If you only have $800 to spend on a camcorder, Panasonic’s NV-GS180 should be the one.

Western Digital Passport Portable Drive 120GB

PRICE $260 SUPPLIER www.hboutlet.com.au INTERNET www.wdc.com

Western Digital has made a number of improvements on the original My Book with the Pro Edition. The capacity is a huge 500GB, and you get both FireWire 400 and 800 as well as the original USB 2 interface. The inner light on the circular power button now lights up in 17% increments to give an at-a-glance indication of how much space is remaining. Our speed tests produced some highly respectable results: 100Mb/s for writing and 133Mb/s for reading. You also get near-silent running, all of the cables you need to get started, and a price that’s not too much higher than what you’d pay for an internal 500GB drive. For external storage and backup, this drive is practically perfect.

Apple MacBook Pro

PRICE $3999 SUPPLIER Apple 133 622 INTERNET www.apple.com.au

Following on from the original MacBook Pro, this new revision is externally unchanged. But Apple has replaced the 2GHz Core Duo with a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo, and installing Windows with the aid of Apple’s Boot Camp produced a gratifyingly high benchmark score of 1.29, with accompanying battery life times of 2hrs 52mins under light use and 1hr 50mins under intense use. There’s also 2GB of RAM, a 120GB hard disk and an excellent 15.4in, 1440 x 900 widescreen LCD, as well as superb ergonomics. It isn’t so hot on sheer value, though, as the $3999 price tag testifies. But this sleek laptop is still a genuine head-turner and has the advantage of running Mac OS X too.