AFSCME 3357-HOF'S BLOG

JVC-GR-DF550 Camcorder

Spring is big time to buy camcorders. There are weddings, graduations, and vacations on the way. I bought a new camcorder last year, a Canon ZR-85, and it is piece of junk. It takes worse video that the 9 year old RCA Hi-8 model that it replaced. I'm now looking to replace the Canon, and this JVC is the leading candidate. I'm writing this mostly to warn off potential buyers of Mini DV camcorders about design problems that are common to the vast majority of popular priced (under $500 street) camcorders out there. (This is more of a preview than a review because I don't have the JVC-GR-DF550. A friend asked me what kind of camcorder he should get, so I'm copying to the blog what I recommended to him.)

As they've shrunk camcorders, they've shrunk the image sensor. This results in less light hitting the image sensor and poor low-light performance. The Canon ZR-85 has a 1/6 inch image sensor, and it's low light (read: indoors) performance just stinks. The JVC linked below has a 1/4.5 sensor and digital noise reduction.

In the name of cost control, Canon did away with microphone inputs, so there's no way to record live sound through an external input. You have a gret and growing discrepancy between big zooms on the video and audio that's tied to the camera body. JVC is one of the few camcorders in this class that retains a microphone input.

The Canon shoots the miniDV format which in theory has resolution up to ED quality (about 480 lines of resolution). Nevertheless, it doesn't have an S-video out jack, so you are limited to composite video resolution when you play back on your television. The JVC has S-Video out.

The JVC has an impressive still camera pixel resolution of 1.33 megapixels. While that is low compared to still cameras, remember, you can use the optical zoom on the camcorder which is better than almost all consumer grade digital still cameras. Once you are zoomed out 2-3x, you arent' going to be able to keep the camera still enough to maintain useful resolution of better than 1.33 megapixels without sophisticated optical image stabilization. Optical image stabilization is still the province of >$1000 cameras.

So for a street price of under $500, the JVC GR-DF550 looks like the model to get in the 2005 camcorder class.

JVC GR-DF550 Camcorder Review - MiniDV Camcorders - JVC Camcorders - Camcorder Reviews - Consumer Camcorders - Camcorderinfo.com