If you are looking for a camcorder for an easy home video recording. This review might be helpful to you.
I purchased JVC Everio GZMG330 one week ago. I thought about buying a SONY DCR SR42 at first, but the model is discontinued. I thought SONY SR42 was the smallest among the HDD camcorder, but this is even smaller than SONY SR42. This is much slimmer than SR42. This is really small to fit in my small hand very well. I got a sapphire blue one. It's really cool. I wonder why most camcorders are in the silver color only. It looks really pretty in the bright sunlight outdoors.
The HDD camcorder is the right decision I made. I used to have dozens of tapes for the old SONY camcorder (well organized though). After I used this for couple of days, I realized that HDD is the perfect solution for camcorders. You can record video all day long without worrying about the tape recording time. In fact, battery life is your only limit for recording. ^^ I recorded my son's soccer game for about an hour. It spent about 3 GB of the storage. Not bad.
35x zoom is great. I didn't pay too much attention to the optical zoom, but it turned out to be very important for various shootings. You can zoom in and see objects which you cannot distinguish well with your bare eyes. It's a good idea to use a tripod if you spend much time in the zoom recording.
The connection to the computer is easy and intuitive. However, the bundled software to organize the video files runs very slowly and its GUI looks pretty simple and ugly. The video editing S/W has better GUI though.
The image quality is okay. I didn't have a chance to compare the image quality of all the camcorders. It looks better than the old tape camcorder or VHS tape recorded video on TV. It's not as good as the DVD titles. It could be nice if the camcorder had an s-video output. On computer, the image looks much better. Especially after you finish the video rendering into DVD HQ format with the bundled software, you'll find out that the video shows smoother motion than the original 'MOD' one. You cannot play the MOD video from the media player directly. You need to convert it to MPEG2 format using the bundled software. The max video resolution is SD 720x480. Anyway, I didn't expect the highest quality video at this low budget camcorder. For a casual home video recording, the quality looks fine with me. However, I'm curious how good the video quality of this camcorder is compared with others though.
However, you should handle the LCD panel carefully. It looks weaker than other camcorders. The average image and fragile LCD is why I give 4 instead of 5 stars.
Buy JVC Everio GZ-MG330 30 GB Hard Disk Drive Camcorder with 35x Optical Zoom (Silver)
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