JVC GR D70 > Reviews > A great beginners camcorder from JVC

Author's product rating:   

Ease of use	Good
Recording quality	Excellent
Picture quality	Excellent
Sound quality	Good
Value for money	Excellent

Advantages:	Has all the features you would want for a beginners camcorder
Disadvantages:	When light levels are low the picture can become a little jerky and grainy .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

First things first. This is NOT the best camcorder on the market. It is NOT the smallest or the lightest.

But what this camcorder has going for it is that it is a very good all rounder. It has a massive amount of features and as such clearly beats its similarly priced competitors.

You can check the technical specs for yourself in the product information; the purpose of this review is to let you know how it handles.

The size isn't really much of a problem, especially if like me you have big hands, because smaller corders can be a bit fiddly when your hand is bigger than it is.
So the GR-D70 is just the right size to fit nicely in your hand giving easy access to all of the features, although you may need a nimble thumb to quickly switch between, manual and auto focus and play back. but it keeps your fingers and thumbs away from the mic which can only be a good thing.

The stereo microphone is sensibly placed below the lens, which really helps the quality of sound that it picks up (some cameras put the mic above the lens, so the lens can obstruct the sound being received). The camcorder allows sound to be recorded, either 12bit sound or 16bit CD quality.
On the downside the positioning of the mic does mean that you can sometimes pick up the feint whir of the zoom.

The tape loads into the bottom of the corder, which from my point of view is fine because with the long play feature, I rarely have to change the tape during a project. Though I'm sure this may be a bit of a pain if you want to use a tripod, because you may need to remove the corder from the tripod to ensure the tape goes in straight, and so you don't get your hand caught in the auto loading mechanism.

The camcorder has a nice range of digital effects on the camcorder itself, which are very useful if you want to add interesting effects like screen wipes and fades or black and white and sepia without having to edit the tape through your computer. Editing on a computer is very easy to do using the software that came with the camcorder, and allows you to take stills straight of the video as well as being able to order the clips and add text where you want.

One of the nice features with this camcorder is that it doubles as a reasonable quality digital still camera which can store photos either directly onto the tape or on an SD or mutli-media memory card. These photos can then be put on your home PC and edited the same way you would any other digital image. JVC also provide software for this in the package as well as a USB cable.

Unfortunately they do not provide you with a firewire cable to transfer the video to your PC, but these are quite cheap to get hold of yourself.

Included with the camcorder there is also an AV cable to connect it to your T.V. or VCR which will allow you to edit video on your VCR or you can use the S-Video connection on the camcorder.

The zoom on this camcorder is quite impressive. The 16x optical zoom gives you amazing close ups with no loss in quality, but then when you switch to 700x digital zoom you can get up close and personal with an object an incredible distance away, but as you zoom in you do begin to lose quality as you get closer to 700x and you will need a tripod or a very steady hand to keep the object in shot.

The remote control that comes with this camcorder has all of the basic functions that you would need for remote filming or remote playback and is easy to use; just make sure you point it at the camcorder. As with most camcorders of this type you can rotate the TFT screen 180° and the image will flip, so that if you are recording yourself you can still see what the camera sees.

All in all this is a lovely little camcorder, that’s a nice size and a nice weight, even with the medium size battery, which you need if you want to record on a 60min tape in long play and do any effects, it has a good number of features, with good software support and good support from the manufacturer.

Not a professional camcorder but certainly a great camcorder for someone starting out in the digital video world.