JVC EVERIO HM200 REVIEW

 First impression: The JVC is very cute, small, and works without reading the books or guide. I charged the battery for about 2 hrs before the first use. It started up in about 2 seconds and worked right out of the box. It was so small you could put it in your front pants pocket. Sleek design, simple on and off, battery life isn't the greatest, but that seems common for small batteries on all these camcorders. Bigger batteries are available. The camera must be hooked to the charger in order to charge the battery, but the charging cord is small and not a bulky mess. Fits nicely in most camera bags.

Pros: It takes incredible outdoor HD videos. With enough light this little dynamo is really stunning compared to my previous miniDV standard definition tape camera (sony trv-19, which died after 4 yrs)... It looks just as good with outdoor shots as nearly every other HD camcorder I researched through online videos.  The compact size, easy menus, and great videos already have this thing at 5 stars.

Audio seems to be very good. There is a wind cut option for outdoor filming which works very well. Indoor audio caught everything I expected and wanted.

There are auto features as well as a few manual control options. The flexibility is nice, but I imagine most people would use auto most of the time.

It comes with a remote control to start and stop recording and handle playback. Very handy.

Here's a sample video I made using the Everio HM200

There is a 20x optical zoom, and 200x digital zoom. So far I've only used the 20x digital and it definitely works great. It's very hard to hold the camera steady with that far of a zoom. If you had a monopod or tripod it would work much better.  Imovie 09 has a stabilizing feature that takes care of the basic problems, while it is time consuming it does work very well. That can aleviate some of the shake you may get on otherwise great footage. The camera does have digital image stabilization, but optical would have been better. I can tell a difference between using it and not, but having optical would be better I'm sure.

It hooks up to my 3.06 GB 24" aluminum imac with supreme ease. I got a Transcend 8 GB SDHC Class 6 flash memory card with card reader for it. Just pop the card out of the camera, into the card reader and put the card reader on any USB port. Open imovie 08 or 09 and it will instantly recognize the card and ask you which clips you want to import and at what resolution (large 960 x something) or (HD 1920 x 1080). The supersize image at 1920 definitely takes up a lot of harddrive space. And the mac needs all of the 4GB of RAM I have to smoothly run imovie both for import and for editing/viewing. A slower computer with less RAM could struggle badly. I have VMware Fusion running Windows XP on this imac also, with 2GB of RAM dedicated to the XP file and 2GB dedicated to the imac. Whenever I would run imovie and still have VMWare fusion running it would blue screen that WXP operation and run a complete memory dump every time. It taught me that the imovie application needs a lot of RAM in order to process these large HD video files. If you have 2GB of ram for your mac, consider importing only at the large file size, not the full 1920 size. I don't notice much image quality loss at the lower setting and it does save quite a bit of harddrive space as well as RAM resources. At least on my computer.

It's tiny size means it fits perfectly in my Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home photography messenger bag along with my Nikon D40x, Nikon 18-200mm VR [Vibration Reduction] DX Lens, all cables, cards and charges.

Cons: The inside videos on the auto setting are dreadful without enough light. I don't just mean "poor" like every other review, I mean so bad you can't use them. On a computer screen they come out ok, but hooking up the camera to a TV, especially through an HD cable to an HDTV, you were met with an image that was dark, pixelated, streaking and obviously interlaced pixels behind moving children and generally just awful to watch. When hooked up to a 65" widescreen HDTV it was substantially worse than our standard definition footage from 5 years ago. Even on a 37" HDTV it was still too pixelated to be useful. There are manual control settings for scenes, white balance and shutter speed which can all be played with to get a better image. I was able to tweak it enough to get a good indoor living room shot at 5 pm in mid summer. That means all windows should be open to get as much outside light as possible, turn on the interior lights and be ok with images still of a lesser quality than outdoor. Anything later in the even would not be a smooth image. 5 pm in the winter would likely be unusable (and we have 3 winter birthdays). Perhaps my expectations were too high. I thought that an HD camera would always produce an HD picture and the sales pitches all made it sound like this thing would look "like I was watching Discovery channel." Wrong. Perhaps outdoors (if I could keep it still), but inside is another matter entirely. Demo videos I found were 99% outdoors, so I'm loading some inside shots for you to see.

The camera does have a light in front to assist with low light shooting. Unfortunately this light is so blindingly bright, anyone you were filming would shriek and run away. It's just incredibly bright. I suppose great for filming static objects that can't see, but any human would object. To me that renders it unusable in most situations.

I didn't really need this camera for still shots because I have a wonderful Nikon D40X with 18-200 zoom lens that takes every still shot perfectly. But it did occur to me that pulling out a still shot frame from a video would be perfect to capture that perfect expression or lightning bolt. While imovie does a fabulous job of making this possible, the resulting image is grainy, and not really usable for print photos. Still shots on the camera are slightly better. They're ok, but my Nikon is far superior. Still shots are captured at about 2 megapixels, but that's not really enough in my eyes.

I've read over and over again about how the software that comes with it is awful. Since I'm using imovie the software is a non issue. Sony Vegas was recommended for PC users.

Since we intend to use this camera primarily for indoor shooting it seemed like I needed to compare it to another camera in the same price range. Other reviews have said the Canon HFS100 was steller for everything, but that's a $1000 camera and my budget just isn't that high. The next option that had popular reviews and lots of available research footage online was the Canon HF200.

Unfortunately I learned about Amazon's habit of changing prices on a moment's notice the hard way. 2 days after I decided I would probably buy the Canon HF200 for comparison the price jumped from $600 to $750 through Amazon. Cheaper prices were available through outside retailers, all good merchants, but they had 15% restocking fees. If the Canon turned out to be no better than the JVC then I'd be out either $90 restock fee plus shipping, or would have to keep the Canon regardless and simply return the JVC. I opted to wait until the Canon became cheaper at Amazon (still hoping it does).  Update: Price came down 2 days later, back to $599.  Ordered the Canon HF200 with 2 day shipping.

GO TO THE CANON HF200 REVIEW

If you want further reviews or to purchase any of the camcorders mentioned here, these are the direct links to the products at Amazon.com

JVC Everio GZ-HM200 Dual SD High-Def Camcorder (Black)

Canon VIXIA HF200 HD Flash Memory Camcorder with 15x Optical Zoom

Canon VIXIA HFS100 HD Flash Memory Camcorder with 10x Optical Zoom

Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home Photography Messenger Bag - I love this bag! You could also consider the Crumpler 6 Million Dollar Home if you have a lot more gear.

Transcend 8 GB SDHC Class 6 Flash Memory Card with Card Reader TS8GSDHC6-S5W - this is best so you don't have to plug in the cameras to get video onto the computer. Works really slick!

GO TO THE SUMMARY AND FINAL CONCLUSION PAGE