Overall, I’m very happy about this purchase, and I would recommend it for anyone looking to buy a great camera for every day use, or even for filming small movies for fun.
Rating: 5 / 5

Once I was back from office I thought of taking a tour. I took it out for a shoot. At around 5PM with ambient sunlight video quality was good but wanted to see how would that come out in my Laptop, so plugged it in but none of the video player supported the format of the movie. Was disappointed, then thought of taking night shot, this is where i started disliking it. There was sufficient amount of light in the room and out side too, but the video was appearing to be dull, so went into manual mode and tried to increase the exposure, ohh no change. There is a option where in the video capture increases to a drastic extent I guess it is the night mode (but not specified in the option list) when I switched over to this video was pathetic, it was so blur and a slight movement would distort the image.

One more thing, when you are recording in a silent sight you would hear extra noise out of it no clue where the hell it is coming from.

Thinking of returning it back.

Rating: 3 / 5

and why the heck would they force interlaced video… It sucks… it Looks terrible viewed on my 50″ lcd hdtv…. I have to first convert everything over to deinterlaced… Also to strip the extra byte off their format to make it reg mpg you need to import it into powerdirector it will conver/strip the encoding off and leave you with a regular mpg (no conversion or re-compression)

I would have bought the Canon hd10, but the speed of the zoom on the canon was slower than a snail, but video on the canon looked much better… I should have just put up with the slow zoom… at least the canon stays in focus that way…

PS, the $400 minidvd camcorders Have Way better stabilization… this camera just isn’t very usable… it prob isn’t worth a dime… Skip JVC and buy the canon…

Rating: 2 / 5

The TOD format that it records in is just MPG and you can simply rename the file extension – it’s annoying but I wrote a little one line shell script to rename the files which I can then work on in any standard editing program. While there are complaints of a lack of view finder I cannot see the point of it and find the 16×9 screen to be simply awesome.

Also the night mode that some have complained about is actually really good! Sure it’s choppy if you’re hand holding but on a tripod it really comes into its own and brings some great colour into very dark shots with very little ambient light. I highly recommend working in dark settings with a manual aperture setting rather than relying on the auto mode. Let’s face it, if you’re hand holding in night mode and expect things to be smooth your expectations of a camera in this price range are far too high and you really need to lay down a hell of a lot more money for your HD camera purchase.

My only real annoyance is not really the camera’s fault but a fault in HDD cameras in general. The microphone (which is actually pretty good) tends to record the noise of the hard drive as it records in really quiet settings. This can be greatly diminished with a hotshoe mic or removed altogether with a external mic however. Any serious videoing should incorporate these accessories anyway.

Overall a great amateur HD camera that is both robust and handy while producing some wonderful HD footage providing you take the short amount of time to learn its capabilities.
Rating: 4 / 5