Great 3CCD camera!

I have used this camera for about 3 years now and I love it. It has great features, specs and continues to be an industry standard after many years.

Video Quality
There is a reason that everyone uses the PD170 as a baseline standard. The quality of video coming out of this compact camera is hard to beat. The 3CCDs offer superb color quality and great low light levels.

Audio
One of the reasons I keep using this camera is because not many cameras offer dual channel XLR ports with automatic/manual level control on each. The auto gain function works perfect but the manual gain control is needed when hooking up to a mixing board. The included shotgun microphone is very versitile and can pick up audio from very far away. I'm impressed with it being a stock piece of audio equipment.

Aquisition Formats
The camera supports DV or DVCAM mode. Using an 80min DV tape you can get up to 60min in DVCAM mode. You can also output over firewire to an external IEEE1394 (firewire) hard drive or to a PC (Adobe Onlocation for example). I have used a Firestore 40GB drive with mine, in addition to the tape drive, and was able to copy my video session over within minutes of the video shoot.