My JVC Everio GZ-HM670

[Bishop_99]

I recently purchased a JVC Everio GZ-HM670, upgrade from my previous JVC GR-D850. The main reason I upgraded my camcorder is that I wanted to start recording my home videos in HD, and since I bought a BD burner earlier this year, I was going to put it to good use.

The online place were I bought this camcorder indicated that it was in Full HD (1080p). While it's true that the camcorder records in 1920x1080, it's an interlaced signal and not progressive. I bought it anyways to try it out and if I wasn't happy, I would send it back. The camcorder records up to 24 Mbps. After I received the camera and I began recording, I was pleased with what I saw. The bad side is that the image has more noise than I expected in the decently lit indoor scenes and in the night scenes the noise isn't too excessive but a strange ghosting effect appears when I pan the cam, I'm still trying to figure out what is causing that. It seems as if the camcorder applies some kind of noise reduction and that is what causes that, but I haven't gotten to the root of it. When I switch the camcorder to the picture mode, the ghosting effect is gone in the night scenes and an excessive amount of noise appears on the image.

For the positive, the picture quality is definitely better than that of my previous camera. Outdoor daylight scenes look great and I'm satisfied with the well lit indoor scenes. The convenience of being able to transfer the files in to the computer instead of capturing them in real time is another positive point. While I can't edit to much on sony vegas because my cpu isn't fast enough at the moment, I'm able to merge the video clips with TSmuxer and author a nice Blu-ray disc on DVD Architect. I made a sample test disc with an hour of randomly recorded footage and the video played great averaging about 24 Mbps, and all the sub-menus were very easy to access. I was able to make a "special features" menu to include old SD videos I shot with my old cam and it all played fine. Now I have to film enough to fill up a DL Blu-ray disc.

While I later found out a few other cams record in 1080p with 24fps or 60fps, they were a little out of my price range because of the software I had to get. I can say that I'm pretty happy with my first HD cam.