First, you should know I'm a "hobbyist" who knows just enough about this stuff to be really dangerous - which means, I don't know a lot. Second, I know that any talk about widescreen or 16:9 in regards to camcorders has the potential of opening a huge can of worms. So, that being said....

For the past 3 years I have used a Sony TRV340 (which recently died) and I always filmed using it's "widescreen" option then edited in Adobe Premiere using the 16:9 presets. NOw, with the Sony dead, i'm looking at either the Canon GL2 or the Panasonc GS400 as options. What I haven't really seen is any comparison on what they do in terms of widescreen and how they accomplish it. Then it would be really nice to know how they compare to the TRV340 (just for the widescreen - I know I'm taking a big step up). I figure, until I go HD, i'll settle for anything at least as good as the TRV340.

Thanks for any tips and help
Carl

I don't know anything about the 340 - and I don't even have a GS-400 or GL-2! But I do know that the Gl-2 doesn't have high enough resolution CCD's to give you "real" 16:9. It letterboxes the image on its 4:3 CCD's which only gives you 720x360 pixels to work with. It then stretches that back to 720x480 to create a proper anamorphic 16:9 image on tape, but in the process you've lost 25% of the vertical resolution.

The GS-400 has 1152x864 4:3 CCD's (same as the PDX-10, which I own). It also creates 16:9 by letterboxing, but the difference is the additional pixels which allow you to capture the full 480 lines of vertical resolution. GS-400 users report that 16:9 quality is very good because of this.

In the DVD "Shoot for the Cut" by DVDOJO, they state that a "nice feature of the GL2 is that it uses the whole chip for 16X9 mode so you retain all of the lines of resolution"....Well I've got a GL2 and when shooting in 16X9, I notice that there is a portion of the bottom picture that gets cut off and then it squeezes the image so that it can be streched when playing on a 16X9 set....So it appears that in fact there is part of the horizontal lines that are cut off....
Len