I am a member of the Amazon Vine Voices program. Every month Amazon sends me a few products that are new or coming soon to market to review on their site. This month I was sent a JVC Everio GZ-HD300 High-Def Camcorder to review.
The JVC is a competitively priced camera that is certainly adequate but far from the best camera in the marketplace.
1080p?
Before I get into other features, it's important to note that this is not a 1080p camcorder! The marketing materials both on the box and here at Amazon indicate this camera shoots 1080 60p. It doesn't. It's 1080i running at 29.97 frames per second. While this shoots 60 /fields/ per second, it's not the holy grail of 60 /frames/ per second. The product manual does indicate the correct output resolution, but it's unfortunate that JVC is misleading customers into thinking this is a true 1080p device.
FEATURES
The JVC Everio is definitely smaller and lighter than most of the cameras in its product range even with a 60 gig hard disk crammed in. JVC is "checking all of the boxes" for a good consumer camera, including facial recognition, 24 megabit maximum recording (which is unfortunately off by default), and a hard disk that records about five hours of footage at the highest quality setting.
The biggest omission, something that JVC is not alone in omitting, is a microphone port. It just infuriates me to see this becoming more of the norm for consumer cameras, dooming users to a lifetime of lousy audio. Good audio is such an important part of good video, and the lack of even the option to bring in an external microphone is a real deal breaker.
OPERATION
My real issue with this camera, despite all of its features, is that it does nothing particularly well. JVC opted for a touch sensitive "laser touch" glowing navigation pad that is difficult to use with menu options that don't make much sense. For example, the menu description for the built in stabilizer reads "image blurred need to reduce camera shake..." Huh? I was equally confused by an "auto manual" icon that doesn't tell me what exactly it is I am manually controlling. There are no manual white balance, focus, aperture, or shutter controls that I could find.
The hard drive is responsive and relatively quiet. I predict this will likely be the last year for hard drive based recorders given how inexpensive large flash drives are becoming. Avoid buying this for kids who are rough on their equipment, as hard drives do not fare as well as flash drives do when getting knocked around.
The camera touts a bunch of 'one touch' features that ease the uploading of video from the camera back to a computer as well as YouTube. The problem is that none of these features work on a Mac. The camera does, however, interface perfectly with iMovie and Final Cut Pro.
IMAGE QUALITY
For a 2009 model year camera I was extremely disappointed with the output quality. I ran test footage side-by-side with last year's Canon HF-100 in a naturally lit room. The older camera far exceeded the JVC's output. The JVC was overly grainy with very flat colors. Image quality improved outdoors in good light, but still not as good as the Canon.
CONCLUSION
This is a competitively priced camera that is adequate but not great. There are definitely better models out there, but none that have this amount of storage capacity and features in this small a form factor at this price.
Consider the JVC if you don't care about manual controls, shoot mostly in good light, and don't need a microphone port. If you see yourself becoming a more serious videographer, look elsewhere. You will quickly outgrow it.
