Great...

Author's Rating:

Pros: great quality, easy to use, works well, good value, lightweight

Cons: Bad still pictures, no external microphone jack, short optical zoom

The Bottom Line: 
I definitely recommend buying it unless you are, or are expecting to become, a professional videographer.

Author's Review
I love it. It is all that I ever wanted in a video camera, other than a microphone jack. I bought it because I really enjoy being able to produce good video, and this is almost impossible without being able to use your computer with your camera. I had tried various solutions to change my analog video to digital format, but the quality was so bad that I gave up. I bought this expecting to have to troubleshoot it for hours and hours before I could make it work, and it surprised me by transferring beautiful high-resolution video straight into Apple's iMovie program (I have a 500MHz Apple iMac) the instant I pressed the play button. It only has one CCD, but it has 520 lines of resolution, and on my 20-inch television I could not tell the difference between TV-quality video and my own, even after the video had been edited in the computer.

It has plenty of features for anyone who is either just starting out or is fairly experienced at editing videos. It has a 10x optical zoom, which isn't very much, so you might not want this camera if you have to videotape things that are particularly far away. Although it boasts a 400x digital zoom, I have never used it beyond about 50x because after that it simply becomes a very unprofessional mess of pixellatedness. It also has a black-and-white viewfinder and a color LCD screen. I like this a lot because that way you can set the exposure through the black-and-white viewfinder because b/w allows better judgment of light levels, and you can set the white balance looking at the screen. Another great feature is the remote control. Among other things, it allows you to zoom without moving the camera. This is very useful at high zoom levels, because while you are zooming the stabilizer does not work, so you can quickly lose sight of a faraway object if you touch the camera while zooming. The microphone gets great sound, too.

The digital features are also great. It has a preset for almost any situation, ranging from sports (as fast a shutter as possible) to snow (automatic backlight compensation) to Night Mode, where it makes almost any dark scene bright enough by using ridiculously slow shutter speeds. It also has many digital effects, like black and white and sepia, as well as transitions, but I never use these because it is so easy to apply them later using my computer.

My only major criticisms are the fairly awful still pictures and lack of a microphone jack. The pictures are supposed to be 640x480 pixels, but even on a 640x480 screen they look pretty bad, and printed out they look horrible. So if you are going to shoot still pictures, I recommend bringing along a 35mm camera. The benefit of such low quality is that it can store about 100 pictures on a single card. The microphone jack is a problem for me because sometimes I like to record specific things, like people talking. The built-in mic has incredibly realistic 16-bit stereo sound, but it is omnidirectional, and if you are, say, conducting an interview with a construction crew outside, things will start to get pretty amateur-looking.

If these few problems do not bother you, I definitely recommend buying it. I looked very hard, and I could not find a camcorder with so many features for that price.

UPDATE: In July 2003, after I had had it for about two years, it suddenly stopped being able to record or play back tapes. I tried cleaning the heads to no avail. I took it to a JVC repair shop and paid $250 for the drum to be replaced. They were very nice and gave me some advice to prevent this from recurring, which they probably should have put in the user's manual. The most important: NEVER LEAVE THE TAPE IN THE CAMERA IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO USE IT FOR MORE THAN A FEW DAYS. Do this and the camera will reward you with a long and happy life.