EASY TO USE:If you spend 10-minutes fooling around with the menu and all the buttons, you get the hang of it really quick. I will probably never use the advanced manual functions, but from the look of it manual function menus they seem easy to operate. I would, for this price, expect that there'd be a manual focus ring rather than a screen-based tool for manual focus. The buttons that you use the most like the zoom control, record button, and snapshot button, are in the right places. The camera overall is heavier than a SD camera but not bad at all. It feels sturdy and the battery doesn't add noticable heft to the device. Connecting to the TV with an HDMI cable is easy because it uses a real, full-size HDMI port and automatically activates it when you plug it in. This might be common to all camcorders, but you can use an HDMI hi-def TV as a huge viewfinder if you want... which potentially could be useful.
IMAGE CLARITY:
This is an HD camera, so naturally I expect the image quality to be very, very good. It is crisp but I feel as if it is a little bit grainy, especially in low light. I was not impressed by it at all and I'm highly considering returning it. The 3CCD system is supposed to reproduce the best colors but I felt as if reds and blues were muted of course I'm no color theory-trained person. The first few times I used this were during a snow storm to record the beating we were getting here in Minneapolis and at an ice-skating rink. Not the two biggest color-rich environments but still I saw colors and details that the camera screen didn't see and to me, for an HD 3CCD camera, I feel it should have.
ZOOM & FOCUS:
The optical zoom operates at the right speed I'd say. The camera focuses fairly quickly, though I question why it doesn't go any faster. The big problem is, when you get passed approx. 6x it starts to lose its ability to focus up-close. So say you are sitting at your desk that is against a wall and you want to zoon in on the face of the person in the artwork on that wall. You zoom, zoom, zoom all the way to 10x which gets you close enough to fill the entire screen with the person's little face in the artwork. But it's blurry. The camera actually automatically backs-out the zoom until it is able to focus. I find that ridiculous. I zoomed in that far because I wanted to see the face of the person in the artwork fill the entire screen from the distance at which I was holding the camera. If you move the camera closer manually, it does a better job but is still obviously limited. I was dissapointed here.
LOW LIGHT:
I'm not expecting greatness in low light. I realize that top movie cameras even need lighting to capture people properly at light. But while at the ice skating rink, they turned the lights down low for that romantic feel (I suppose) and all of a sudden everyone's face disappeared and colors significantly reduced. It wasn't dark, it was amber-like; there was actually quite a bit of light remaining. I tried the night-mode which immediately increased the camera's ability to see light to where I think it should have been able to do w/out a setting but it became choppy and lost all use the shutter speed slowed. Why in the world would I want the shutter speed to slow so much that the filming looks like I'm making a slasher movie all choppy and traily. The only use of it is to plant the camera on a tripod and make people walk very slowly. It doesn't have that green-looking night-vision mode like Sonys do, which, even though its not in prestine color, allows you to see things happening at night, which is the point. The only time it does "well" at night is when there is a light bulb in the area and it picks up the light well from that for a certain distance away from the light source. Then it just sort of reverts back to its dismal low-light capability around the edges. I was dissapointed here.
Picture quality, focus, and low-light ability are like the kitchen and bathroom of a house. You can have just okay features otherwise, but if these features aren't great, you just don't have a good camera. I don't consider these features to be great, especially for a camera with an MSRP of over $1,000. I got it for $830 for Marcus Audio through Amazon.com. I think I'd be willing to pay $700 for it as it is.
I'll update you if I decide to return it (and let you know if Marcus Audio is a pain in the butt to return a product to). I need to see if the Sony or other brands are any better. I need something that is good in low light. I don't need the best colors at low-light, but I need to see faces. Problem is, trying to test these things without a salesperson looming over you at Best Buy or Circuit City is a pain because they never have power, they are usually screwed up because some kid took a billion pictures or videos with it and hit a bunch of buttons, or they are attached to an alarm system that keeps going off. Annoying. Hence my love of Amazon.com.
I was drawn to the camera because of the HDD digital storage and it seemed to be high quality when compared with others that I experimented with in it's class without being bulky, or having an awkward or complicated user interface. Once I discovered this unit at my favorite technology retail store, I did a lot of research on the device its features and usability, and tried to find it's weaknesses from any professional review I could locate. I did all my searching on the Internet. What I found was that nearly all the reviews were raving when compared with others (it was a leader in major publishers). The weakness that was pointed out by only a few reviews was that it seems to have an ever so slight difficulty managing orange toned colors. Particularly in bad lighting. This was an acceptable downside to me considering how well it outperformed many other areas in autofocus, zoom, anti-wobble (stabilization for shaky hands), shutter speed, backlighting, flash (with anti-red-eye), color accuracy (despite the orange issue), viewfinder, user interface, digital storage speed, and quality of resulting video. The photography aspect doesn't come lacking either. However, the orange issue applies also to stills. BTW, (reviewer note) this is more apparent to me since the interior of my house is painted with earth tones. The camera doesn't have any trouble at all in natural (outdoor) lighting.
The camera's hard drive also has a shock-proof feature to protect the hard drive in a fall, an input jack for an optional external microphone, 10x/40x/300x zoom, and several other features. Another professional review was displeased with the built in microphone (I haven't noticed this problem). But that's certainly eliminated with the optional external microphone and mount-point. Another great usability feature is that the most common scene capture adjustments you would want to make can be set from a mini on-screen popup menu, the more uncommonly used adjustments are made via the main menu. The popup menu can be accessed and adjusted during video recording (which would also be noticed on the resulting video).
One downside I have encountered is that the file output is not a common output format (perhaps it is to support higher quality video recordings). MOD is this file format. I don't know what that is so I end up converting all my movies to MPG. If I didn't have a way to record a script on my computer this batch conversion process would have been very frustrating and time consuming.
The user manual was straight-forward and thorough. I read the whole thing in a few sittings when I bought it and have been very glad I did. I couldn't have gotten up to speed with it nearly so fast. Firstly, the user interface has very few controls, very few buttons. That's what I wanted, but it meant that I would have to learn to navigate the menus in order to know where to find what I wanted to execute it quickly in live action. The manual certainly met my needs in that area. So there is a learning curve. It's been 15 months (birth of our first-born) since I bought it and I'll be returning to the manual for a refresher on those infrequently used features which could be helping me and I've simply forgotten.
Overall, the camera is easy to adjust and get into the action quickly. I personnally dislike having to make a party wait for the camera man to adjust his (complicated) camera. I didn't want to be that camera man. This camera has been an excellent fit.
I know the 3CCD is a major innovation but I don't remember much about it but it takes great videos and pictures. I certainly recommend it, but I
can't give it 5 stars for the orange tone management. Probably a 4.5!!Bought the camera 1 month ago from Amazon. Easy to use and download software (I'm not a techi). I needed to spend some time to get used to the editing software with the camera, but now I can use most basic functions. Microphone can pick up any adjustments you make to the camera while filming, so just try to use adjustments sparingly. Excellent HD camera for the price. Happy with the purchase and will probably upgrade camera with microphone to help pick up speeches etc...I bought this Video Camera a month before just for a Trip to Peru Last Year..While I was on the plane arriving to the city of Cuzco from Lima I was filming the magnificent view that I had from my window when suddenly it just cut off. then I turned back on...then it gave a message Error Message..
I panicked first! I didn't really paid any attention to the message...I just turn it off completely.. When I arrived to the Hotel I turned it back on...and then I found out the message said..
Hard Drive Error...and I had already like an hour of filming around City of Lima and La Punta...I did everything I could to try to get it back to normal operation..nothing seems to work..
I told my wife..the only choice that I had it's to format the Hard Drive...maybe it will work....I was dead wrong...it didn't work..the Hard Drive Error..not Hard Drive no memory to record..
then I went to ruins (Machu Picchu) I just took pictures I was so disappointed, upset with JVC Camera Performance...Cuzco it's about 11,800 ft high..at the third day of my trip to Machu Picchu, I went back to Lima, Peru. I turned it back on. And It just worked Perfectly, ever since...I Can't Recommend this camera if you're a planning a trip If Altitude is involve...picture quality in daylight is great, AT NIGHT it's very disappointing..This is my 3rd 'family' camcorder and the best one thus far. When my son started playing high school football it only took me one season to realize that the current camcorder wasn't getting the job done. Not only that but the conversion from tapes to DVD was SO painful. I did a lot of research on what I was going to need to shoot action movement at night. For the money that I was willing to spend this was the camera that came out on top. I have not been disappointed to date. By his junior year I was back to researching exactly what college coachs wanted in the way of a 'high light' DVD and realized that I already had the tool to give them exactly what they wanted. I have no doughts that the HD quality DVD and the ability I had to zoom into the line and single him out from the stands made a diffence in his choice college offering him a try out. The only draw back was the software that comes with it. I dumped that and use the full version of Power Producer and Power Director. I have just recently started using it to shoot indoors activities (ceremonies and functions) and have added a Rode shotgun microphone to get better sound. This camcorder has been well worth the money spent and I would absolutely buy it again. Be sure you buy an extra battery or two though. The standard battery last about (just) until half time of a high school football game. The larger batter last longer but NOT as long as it advertises.
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