Not bad for the money

Author's Rating:

Pros: compact, good battery life, reasonable low light performance and quality video

Cons: Video quality could be better. Lacking firewire cord needed to transfer video to computer

The Bottom Line: 
If you are just looking to snap home videos, this thing will be fine for you.

Author's Review
I bought this product about 8 months ago to replace an old GR DVM-90 I had (also from JVC). My old camera performed very well (until I started getting strange error messages), which was why I chose another compact DV camcorder from JVC.
I was really looking for something to tide me over for a few years until HD camcorders became more prevalent and the prices go down. I chose the product for price, size and loyalty to JVC.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Out of the box the product lives up to the advertising on its size. It really does fit into your palm very well. The ergonomics are quite good and the screen (on the 97 its larger than the 77 model) is quite large. It does look a little "plasticky" though compared to my older camera, which was very solid and seemed to be made mostly of metal alloys.

I've had the opportunity to use it in a variety of situations over the last few months, including weddings and outdoor sporting events. My findings so far are the following:

USING THE CAMERA
The quality of the lens is not the greatest in my opinion. The clarity of the image has suffered compared to what I had before. Its a tiny lens for one thing. The quality of the resulting video is still far ahead of anything you will get with an 8MM camera (of course), but I think you could probably do better. It doesn't seem as crisp as I noticed in the past. To validate this I reshot some footage that I had taken before with my older camera). Colour reproduction is quite good though, as is its low light performance. You still need some good lighting though for reasonable video taken inside on a cloudy day.

The image stabilisation is ok. Its electronic vs. a true mechanical stabilisation though.

I haven't used the feature that allows you to use flash memory to store pictures. With the resolution I prefer to take pictures with a digital camera anyway.

Battery life is quite good. I haven't had any problems taking up to an hour without running out of juice. It is odd though that the package doesn't come with an "off-camera" charger for the battery pack. You can buy one (about $50 I think) or charge it by plugging the supplied AC charger into the camera itself while the battery is attached.

I also thought it was interesting that the camera didn't come with a IEEE 1394 cord, which you need to transfer the video. I just re-used an old one I had.

Overall, I think I got what I paid for ($397 in Aug. 2005). If you are a savier videophile I'm sure you will look elsewhere (but pay more).