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JVC G7-HD7 Everio Hard Drive Camcorder

Charlie White — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:59:24 -0600

With its stylish square lens hood and beautiful design, the HD7 just begs you to pick it up and start shooting. We especially like its focus ring (it’s just like what’s on pro lenses), which you can use to manually focus the lens. However, we don’t much care for the lens cover that makes you shift a lever to move it out of the way. Nor were we impressed with its optical image stabilization, which didn’t seem to do much of anything. We also didn’t care for the break in the audio between each shot when we played back output via HDMI on our HDTV.

There are lots of buttons on this baby, and we prefer its joystick navigation to any touch screen.

While this camcorder can shoot full 1920x1080i HD, its footage didn’t look as good as the video from any of the other cameras we tested. That said, this camera’s video still looked nice, and it was especially clean when scenes were bathed in bright outdoor light. But in medium light, there was noticeable noise in the shadows, and when we moved the camera or framed up moving objects, there were slight motion artifacts. Worse, even when manually white balancing, colors looked artificial to us, and the camera didn’t have enough contrast latitude, so bright objects looked blown out if there was any darkness in a scene.

While its “Full HD” 1920x1080i setting uses a proprietary variable bitrate MPEG-2, if you shoot in its 1440 HD constant bitrate mode; its files are compatible with HDV editors—making it easy to edit output. In our tests, we couldn’t see any difference between the 1920x1080i “Full HD” setting and 1440x1080i HD settings, making us prefer the more-compatible 1440 mode.

Panasonic HDC-SX5

Charlie White — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 22:59:24 -0600

Here’s the most versatile camcorder of the bunch, letting you record 28 minutes of its best-quality video per 3-inch DVD. If you don’t feel like dealing with discs, you can cram 80 minutes of HD footage on an 8GB SDHC flash memory card instead. If you do record to a DVD, you can pop that disc into a compatible Blu-ray player (our Sony BDP S-300 played the disc perfectly) or play the disc back directly from the camera. But the DVD format has its drawbacks—it’s slow to read when you turn on the camera, taking seven seconds from a cold start. And once you’re done shooting, unless you’re using DVD-RAM, you’ll need to finalize the disk before you can read any of the files on the computer or play them back, which takes about five minutes for each minute of footage shot.

We like the three-second preroll function that records the previous three seconds before you push the record button when you’re using an SDHC flash memory card. In bright light, this sucker cranked out images with astonishing clarity, splashing well-saturated colors all over the screen with nary a motion artifact. However, some high-contrast shots proved a challenge for the SX5, blowing out the whites while keeping the darkest objects in the frame hidden in obscurity. In medium-intensity lighting, such as indoors on a cloudy day, some mottling was visible in darker areas. These weaknesses aside, the overall quality of the SX5’s video was outstanding.

Panasonic HDC-SD1

Charlie White — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:59:59 -0600

The HDC-SD1 was the smallest and lightest camcorder we tested, and the easiest one to use. It offers few buttons to confuse you and no viewfinder, but wait a minute—that’s a frickin’ 3-inch viewscreen, which seems huge compared to the others’ 2.7-inchers. And it’s bright enough to show you its crispy video even on the sunniest of days. The zoom lever gives you just the right amount of speed right when you need it, and the navigational joystick is right there under your thumb. Its optical image stabilization holds those shots rock-solid unless you zoom all the way to 12x.

Less is more with that selector dial in the back and a start/stop button smartly placed in its center.

The most kick-ass characteristic of this cam is its awesome resolution, the sharpest of all the cameras we tested. But its low-light performance was a bit grainy, and its room-lit video revealed a few subtle noisy spots—nothing bad enough to fret over, however. In bright light, its autofocus impressed us with its sprightly response. Its colors were nicely saturated with auto white balance, but the camera seemed to set the video slightly on the blue side. Colors appeared more realistic when we did a manual white balance by digging into the menus.

And to think, 40 minutes of crisp, clean video fits onto that tiny 4GB SDHC flash memory card at the camera’s highest quality setting. The best news of all is the rock-bottom street price—we’ve seen this bauble selling for just north of $800. Remarkable.