Disappointing. Mediocre compression. HORRIBLE SOFTWARE!
Pros:
Small, light, compact. Easy navigation through the menus.
Cons:
Mediocre image quality. Horrible(!) proprietary software. Unable to use own software.
The Bottom Line:
Until JVC allows you to use your own editing and burning software - AVOID!!! The bundled software is SO awful, that any possible benefit of convenience is eliminated.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
There were just too many frustrations to have to tolerate. I felt relieved, disburdened, when I decided to return it.
The camera had heavy saturation on the greens – greens come out mildly fluorescent. The camera cannot handle mid-level light conditions – the kind that you would find in a typical room in a house – at all well. The image is grainy. The camera had a lot of trouble with leaves and sky. Flashes of yellow kept appearing where the sky should have been.
The software was, if anything, worse and more frustrating than the image quality. I have a Pentium4 with 3 GB of RAM, and the included software – Cyberlink’s PowerDirector – could not import more than five files before it locked up. The only way to get all of the video files imported into a project was to import one file, save the project, and import the next file. Eventually PowerDirector would lock up, I would have to use TaskManager to end the process, then I would have to restart PowerDirector. Frustrating, to say the least. PowerDirector would not even run on a three-year old Celeron machine with onboard graphics and “only” 1 GB of RAM. The error message I got was nothing but a box with an exclamation point and an OK button. Not helpful.
I was hopeful about the camera. The idea about the camera that excited me the most was that because it recorded to mpeg2 files, I would be able to simply copy the files to my computer’s hard drive and edit and burn DVDs in my favorite software (Vegas5 and DVDArchitect2). Boy, was I WRONG! Though the JVC produces files that use mpeg2 compression, they are not technically *.mpg files. They are actually *.mod files. Dragging the files into my editing software gave me only the video channel; there was no sound.
You are REQUIRED to use the software – buggy, slow, minimally useful junk produced by Cyberlink – that is included with the camera. I called JVC to ask if there was any way to use other software with the *.mod files, and the answer was a curt, “No.”
JVC certainly must have had the option of using a 100% compatible mpeg2 file format that could be read by any software that can read mpeg2 files – hundreds of companies and designers made the choice to enable their products to produce 100% compatible mpeg2 files. So why didn’t JVC?
Why did JVC chose to create a proprietary file format that can be read ONLY by Cyberlink’s software? I do not know that answer, but my suspicion is that it involved money – that when JVC and Cyberlink created their relationship, they agreed that Cyberlink had to have a monopoly on the software end of things. That users would quickly realize that the bundled software sucked and that they had to upgrade, and they would have only one place to go – Cyberlink.
Such an arrangement between the two companies must have been financially promising on the front end, but it is an arrangement that caused me to return the camera and recommend to anybody who cares to listen that they NOT buy a JVC hard disk camcorder. I could have tolerated the merely adequate image quality had there been an advantage on the convenience side of the equation, but there was no advantage. In fact, the software was, if anything, worse and more frustrating than the image quality.
