Panasonic has gone above and beyond, releasing its NV-GS35 with its massive 30x optical zoom, dwarfing the usual 20 or so times zooms found on other cameras.

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.

The Panasonic NV-GS15 is the cheaper version of the NV-GS120, but you wouldn't pick it to look at them. It is not until you start to use it that you discover why it is $600 cheaper than its big brother with the three CCD's. The single, 800,000 (400,000 effective) pixel CCD produces average picture quality and certainly nothing that would compare with the 1.62 million (1.02 million effective) of the NV-GS120.

This well-priced mini cam fits snugly in the palm of your hand and like any good entry-level camera can even be used by a child. It's just a matter of pointing and shooting which gets points in our books for a consumer camera.

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.

The GX7A uses a 1.23-megapixel CCD and records stills to memory card. While general image quality was good, the optical zoom was only fair and the electronic image stabiliser was not as good as on some cheaper cameras. The optical zoom produced grainy images before reaching maximum magnification and the sound track was affected by wind noise more than some of the lower priced cameras.

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

The digital still camera is a treat to use.