Panasonic claims this to be the world's smallest palm-type DV camera, and who am I to argue? At just 470 grams and measuring 8.9 x 6.8 x 11.4cm it fits snugly in the palm of most people's hands and, with the aid of its electronic image stabilizer, keeps the picture steady and takes good video.
It handles shadow and bright light well and doesn't have any trouble moving between the two. The overall picture quality is excellent and the Smart Wind Cut noise reduction technology cuts unwanted wind noise to a minimum without eliminating atmospheric background sounds that you want to keep in your movie.
The 8MB SD (Secure Digital) memory cards allows you to take stills at up to 1,280 x 960 resolution, which is enough to provide good sized, quality prints.
However, using the NV-GS5A is not as intuitive as either the Canon MX2i or the Hitachi DZ-MV270E. When compared to the aforementioned cameras, the NV-GS5A takes longer to set up - so you're not going to be able to just install a cassette and start shooting.
Even when you do have it set up, it takes a lot of commands to move from video to still shots and vice versa.
The software includes the usual USB drivers (for transferring photos from the memory card) and ArcSoft's PhotoImpressions, however, they both have to be manually installed, and strangely the camera installs itself as an additional drive.
As a result, PhotoImpressions does not instantly recognise the presence of the camera (although ironically Canon's ZoomBrowser software did) and you have to browse the artificial drive created by the camera to download the pictures.
Thankfully, there is no such problem when downloading videos using FireWire.
Overall it is a nice little camera that is well priced for its capabilities.