The video quality isn’t quite as good as the same price-point Sony Handycams brightness levels don’t adapt quite as fast and the autofocus is a bit slow. The camera does have a hard disk in it, however, so we expect it to be more fragile than a MiniDV camcorder. JVC is one of the biggest consumer electronics companies in the world, and the back the camera with a 1 year parts warranty (90 days labor). The hardware quality is good we had no defects or problems with our unit, and it seems as about as rugged as any camcorder we’ve bought from a major Japanese electronics manufacturer. Using the camera won’t require you to crack the manual if you’ve ever used a camcorder before everything works exactly as you’d expect, and the camera is quite simple to operate. Even so, it has all the standard camcorder features you’d expect, including a 25x optical zoom, a steadiness filter, and so forth. The camcorder is lightweight and very small. Basically, the camcorders can record all day without any media change, and the content is already encoded for burning to DVD. JVC saw this problem and attempted to answer it with a line of camcorders that record in the digital format of DVD called MPEG-2, but they do it to a high capacity hard disk that is the equivalent of 8 full DVD disks.

Even when it all works, it just doesn’t work that well.īut MiniDV tape has significant usability issues too the media is relatively expensive, and creating DVDs either requires a console DVD burner with firewire input or a powerful computer, a lot of time for transcoding, and a bunch of software that isn’t particularly easy to use.īecause of these issues, most people simply never get around to making DVDs of their home videos. And, let’s face it changing media every 30 minutes will ensure that you spend your time minding the camcorder instead of participating in the memorable events of your life. There’s nothing like recording your daughter’s first birthday on a direct-to-DVD camcorder only to have it fail to finalize because Sony wants to ensure that you can only use their specially pre-formatted DVD blanks. Recording directly to DVD doesn’t work well.

But as everyone who buys a camcorder finds out, the devil is always in the details: How fast and easy is it to export the video and create a DVD, and how much is it really going to cost in extra peripherals and software to do it? We put this camera to the test. No tape, no mini-DVDs, and up to 24 hours of recording at a time. JVC is first out of the gate with a hard disk based camcorder that records in the MPEG-2 format of DVD.

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