 |
JVC Everio GZ-MS100
by jj1977
I recieved the JVC Everio GZ-MS100 for Christmas last year and since then I cannot recall a moment I've been disappointed with it. I've long had a good relationship with JVC products and this has continued in a similar vein.
The first thing you notice when you pick this item up is just how light it is. Sure it's compact, but ... some still manage to cram so much equipment in, that the weight becomes an issue. Not so here. It has a flash drive for recording your movies and images and this substatntially reduces the weight at only 270g, making the recording much easier for owners no matter their shape and size.
It's major selling point has been it's Youtube connectivity, meaning no more uploading to files, converting etc, etc. Now you plug in and upload it to your Youtube account and you're in. Easy.
It comes with the F1.8 Konica Minolta lens. It also has a very handy 35x optical zoom. You can also switch to 70x and even 800x, but in a camera this size the quality is non existent.
Advanced features include options to customise brightness and also adjust shutter speed. Another nifty idea is the 'Register Event' system which enables you to tag recordings. Very helpful for quickly finding particular videos if you use a large memory card.
As with most technology these days it posseses a USB port for connection to other devices. Also included is a built in light which comes in handy. Alas, it does not have a socket for an external microphone.
The camera itself is hand sized coming in at 5.4cm x 11.1cm x 6.8cm. It also has a touch screen which flips out from the cameras left hand side measuring 2.7" with 112,000 pixels. From here you can control the functions of the camera and watch what you're filming.
It supports Vista, XP and windows 7 so PC connectivity is easy, and included is a standard rechargeable battery. The Youtube feature probably mark this out as being aimed at the younger user but that should not put anyone else off. It is an entry level unit and as such would be useful for teaching the tricks of the trade for someone who will be looking to expand further into this area. Then again for the casual user it does exactly what you need and at a decent cost.
Read the complete review |
 |
JVC GR-D720
by cognition
The JVC GR-D720 is a mini-DV camcorder in the low budget range. I got mine July 2007 (3 years ago at the time of this review), and I then paid £160 on Amazon.
At the time I got the very cheapest camcorder I could find that would record true widescreen. With mini DV camcorders there are two primary ways to record widescreen. ... The "bad" way is that the camcorder inserts black lines on the top and bottom of the picture, and hence you use a smaller part of the CCD chip. The "good" way, is that the camera uses the entire CCD chip, squeezing it onto the available space, and when you transfer to PC the image is stretched out. This is the way this JVC camera operates, and it leads to better quality than the other approach. The camera can record in both 4:3 and 16:9 format, and the switch is made by pushing a button.
The JVC GR-D720 was released at a time when HD camcorders were just starting to make it onto the consumer market. The very cheapest HD camcorders at the time would cost around £700 or so. Obviously today, this camera would face fierce competition from budget HD camcorders. So for people reading this review today this will mostly cater to those looking into getting a second hand camcorder.
The JVC GR-D720 is a classic case of being both giving value for money, and also being at the very low end of the market. It is a well functioning camcorder with Auto mode, as well as Manual mode, which allows for basic settings to be carried out by the user, such as setting the White balance (telling the camera what colour is "true white" so the camera can adjuet colour input to make up for lighting conditions) or manual focus. I was very excited about the Manual settings. However, these are accessed from LCD menus that require a lot of button pushing and navigation in small menus. On some higher end camcorders manual focus is done by turning the front bit of the camera, where the lense is. On this camcorder it is done by pushing buttons, so there is only one available speed. Basically, I was wanting to use the camera for making short films, and I found the Manual options fairly useless. The Auto settings usually work fine, though. It is quite sad that the manual focus is pretty much useless for any live work. However, keep in mind this is a super low budget camcorder, and it was not made for film making enthusiasts. It is primarily targeted at a point and click audience. And for that it works, and it works well. There are some downsides to the visual quality, though. First of all, light sensitivity. It's very easy in bright sunlight that the brighter areas of the image can be burnt out, so that detail is lost. This visual damage can not be fixed in editing as there is no data for the burnt out areas of the image, just pure white. Similarly, in low light conditions, such as inside, the image very quickly gets grainy. I once tried filming an indoors concert in a club, and the footage turned out basically black. The camera works best under balanced light conditions.
There is a 28x zoom, which works fine, although it can't be operated smoothly for actual filming very well. Like all camcorders, it's hard not to find yourself shaking this camcorder ever so slightly while filming. Thankfully this can be remedied by using a tripod, and good video editing packages can even compensate for this. In editing software this is done by in essence zooming in on the picture and keeping the motif in centre, while cropping the edges as necessary. This can work very well, but the quality loss from zooming in can be very noticable when the source footage is SD. This is something that works much better if the source footage is 1080p HD while the target footage is 720p HD. But sadly this is not an HD camcorder.
The battery is rechargeable and lasts for about 3 hours of filming, which is not too bad. Since this is a Mini DV camera, video is transferred to your PC or Mac for editing through Firewire. This happens in real time. Basically the camera plays back the footage, while the computer records it. This is standard for Mini DV cameras, although with newer cameras there are other options such as a hard drive on the camcorder or a memory card.
I was a bit disappointed with the lack of visual quality, but at the time there was nothing better to be had for that price. I've noticed that these days you can get mini HD camcorders for as little as £100. I haven't had a chance to try one, but I would surely recommend investigating that as an alternative to getting a Mini DV camcoder in this day and age. I'd recommend the GR-D720 if you can get it very cheaply and you want to work with Mini-DV tapes, though!
Read the complete review |
|
|
JVC Everio GZ-MG505EK
by mattr
If a picture tells a thousand words, I'd hate to be given the job of counting how many words a good quality video tells!
I got this product nearly 3 years ago now but its been a very good camcorder and lasted well. I still don't feel inclined to replace it for a while, despite the recent emergence of cheaper HD ... cameras.
At the time I could have stretched to get a HD camcorder, but decided against it as they were still in early days at the time and the footage was difficult to edit afterwards. Even now it seems a bit pointless, as Blu-Ray burners are prohibitively expensive and the sharing format of choice for most is still DVD, so a good standard definition camera isn't obsolete just yet. The only place where homemade high-definition movies are really starting to catch on is with Youtube, but again a standard definition footage from a good camera is still welcomed.
And this is what this camcorder does very well. Footage from all kinds of lighting conditions is of very good quality and looks very crisp and smooth when put on DVD. I've filmed all sorts on this, from live concerts and loud band practises to holiday videos and family moments, and each time its captured them as well as I could have asked from a cheap consumer-level camcorder.
The hard-drive is plenty large-enough to allow for hours of high quality footage without having to worry about running out or switching to a more compressed, lower quality mode. No more worrying about tapes... just open the viewfinder screen when you want to film, the camera turns on automatically when you do so, and you can hit record and film away. It does take a few seconds to turn on which does mean you can sometimes miss the moment or opportunity, but the same applies to any camera.
On manual mode, several different parameters can be played with which makes it easier to set it up correctly when the automatic mode doesn't quite get it right, i.e. in some low-light situations. The manual white-balance is also quite handy as you can calibrate it against a white piece of paper and instantly make the colours look more true to how they are under the current lighting.
The camera itself is reasonably compact and fits snugly in the palm of my hand (though I do have quite large hands) and fits in a case along with a spare battery and charger to give a total complete "travelling package" that's smaller than my previous camcorder was alone!
The battery life isn't great, which isn't helped by the fact that you cannot turn off or close the LCD screen whilst filming (as there isn't another viewfinder, and closing the screen stops filming and turns the camera off), but two fully-charged batteries (lasting around 50 minutes each) easily saw me a day of sightseeing.
The cost of the second battery was quite high - about £50 - but I don't know what I would have done without it. You're limited to genuine JVC-only batteries by special chips in the batteries, something I was caught out by when I tried to use a cheaper imitation battery (that did claim to work with these models, but as it turned out it didn't!).
Footage is transferred onto the computer using a standard USB cable and the camera appears as a universal mass storage device from which the video files can simply be copied and pasted to a suitable location on your computer. The files aren't named particularly well (if you sort them by name, they don't come out in chronological order) so its a good idea to have your files sorted by 'Date Modified' in order organise them and pick particular clips out.
The files have the extension .MOD which throws many people at first, but don't be put off by the apparently proprietary file-type... these are standard MPEG-2 files which can be dropped into most video editors (though some won't accept them until you've renamed them .MPG).
One thing to watch out for is that they are interlaced upper-field-first, as opposed to the DVD standard of lower-field-first, so watch out for this and read up a bit more on interlacing if you don't know what this means. Dealing with this correctly can make the difference between a horrible, jerky video filled with horizontal lines and a nice, smooth, clear video!
The one issue I've encountered is that the camera doesn't seem to like being exposed to very loud noise or excessive bass, presumably due to the operation of the hard-drive and some of the anti-drop / protection mechanisms employed to look after it. Often it will cut out whilst filming a loud music performance and throw up an error that requires it to do a minute or two of drive checking before it will let you continue filming. This also seems to happen more often if its screwed tightly into a tripod rather than being handheld.
As for the sound quality... for gigs that I'm running sound for, I often multitrack record it using my portable recording rig and then sync up the audio with the video afterwards so I don't actually use the camcorder's microphone, but for other videos I've done the sound quality has been more than adequate for picking up speech well, etc.
I haven't used the photo mode enough to be able to comment in any detail on it. The photos are better than most I've seen from a camcorder, but certainly nothing to rave about. Handy if you find yourself without a camera, but I put a 512mb SD card in it when I got the camera thinking I would use it a fair bit and only ever took about 25 picture onto it.
So all in all its been a good, nifty little camera and travelling companion (its been all over the world with me!) and I'll definitely be looking at one of the newer JVC camcorders when it finally comes to replacing it. Whilst being a few years old, its still a great camera in its own right and they can be found really cheaply now.
Read the complete review |
