Great Travel Camcorder - Good Picture/Great Sound
I recently purchased my JVC Everio MC100 at Fry's for $999.99 plus tax. It is the first camcorder I have owned in ten years. So I wouldn't call myself a camcorder expert. This said I travel a lot and have stuck to stills mostly because of weight. When I saw the MC100 I was intrigued. Could I really have DVD quality and a lightweight device? My answer is yes; but it will cost you.
Because Fry's has a 14 day return policy I've really put the MC100 through its paces over the last 12 days. I first went out in the backyard to take a few test stills and movies. The stills were fine. But because the MC100 takes 8 seconds to power up I wouldn't recommend it as a replacement for your still camera. I wife continues to enjoy still photography so between the two of us we have both covered. Again the quality of the stills are fine (for a 2 megapixel camera). If the power up speed doesn't bother you you should be OK. The MC100 has a flash.
The movies? At first I was underwhelmed. When I played the movie back on my PC it looked like it was dropping frames. This was especially noticeable when I panned (moving the camera from left to right or right to left quickly). I became worried. Since the MC100 comes with a S-Video/Audio cable I plugged it into the front of my 60" Sony big screen. The dropped frames problem went away! The problem was my computer (1 GHz with 512MB of memory and an onboard video card). I burned a DVD with my clips from the backyard and played them back on my DVD player. Honestly I couldn't tell the difference between Interlaced (through the S-Video cable) and Progressive (though the DVD player). Most of the pictures were solid. While playing a clip from by DVD player I did notice some jagged edges on the wings of a jet flying over my house. But this was a full zoom (10x) and a moving target.
I noticed another reviewer had a concern about the MC100 in weak light. He said that the colors were pale. I noticed this too. My first movies were taken at roughly 7am in the morning. I noticed that the greens were pale. However I was able to make an adjustment during editing to brighten them up a bit - they looked fine afterwards. I was also able to try out the MC100 inside at my children's Christmas musical. (One thing I can guarantee the MC100 will generate a lot of interest at your children's events... lot's of questions from the other dads!) The colors looked quite vivid. But of course there was lots of light. I was able to zoom in on my kid's faces from approximately 30 feet away thanks to the 10x optical zoom. My daughter was off to the side so she didn't have the spotlight. I was pleased with the results. There is also manual white balance mode that helps to improve the colors in low light. But I haven't had the camera long enough to really get into this. Overall I would give the picture quality an 8.
The MC100 boasts not only DVD picture but DVD sound. For those who know their stuff the sound is taken at 384K bits/second. Yes there are two microphones on the MC100. So you get stereo. I will cover the software in the box but PowerProducer encodes the sound using Dolby Digital. There wasn't really any sounds record in my backyard (with the exception of the air traffic) so again I had to wait for my kid's performance to test the sound. Bottom line - the sound is good. In fact my oldest had a problem with her mic (it didn't work at all) and I had no problem hearing her on playback (she has a strong voice... she was about 15 feet away). Finally I didn't notice any hiss on playback of their performance. But if you go into your bedroom (or some place quiet) and take a short clip you will notice some hiss upon playback if you turn up the volume about three times normal volume to here much of anything. Of course there is no tape (the MC100 uses a 4GB Hitachi microdrive) so there is no tape sound. The zoom is nearly silent. There is no noticeable noise is generated during focus. Over all I am quite satisfied with the sound. I would give it a 9 1/2.
Another viewer mentioned the battery life. Honestly this is a concern for me because I travel. Power isn't always available where I go - remote mountain villages in India for example. One reviewer said that the battery life is 30 minutes. This hasn't been my experience. It is more like 60 minutes - which is all you can record on a single 4GB microdrive at the highest setting anyway. A second JVC battery will set you back $73.12 (yikes). However I found an aftermarket battery on eBay for $22.80. The charge time is roughly 30 minutes (not bad). The MC100 automatically stops charging once the battery is charged. I second microdrive is costly. It will cost you a whopping $567.33 on the JVC site (rip off). I have found the same Hitachi 4GB drive on Amazon.COM for $219.88.
In the past I have used Pinnacle Studio to edit my slide shows as well as to edit the silent AVI movies from my still camera. I was unable to get Pinnacle 8 to accept the MPEG-2 movies produced by the MC100 so I upgraded to Pinnacle 9. Sadly this didn't work either. (This isn't a review of Pinnacle but since many people us Pinnacle be warned it won't accept clips from the MC100 without downconverting them to Interlaced.) The MC100 comes with two programs: PowerDirector and PowerProducer. They are "Express" version so there is limited functionality. In PowerDirector I found it added a transition in the middle of a clip. I saved my work and rebooted and the problem went away. I also encountered a bug with the SVRT feature (saves time during the rendering process). I turn it off and this problem also went away (though it takes double the time of the original clip to render the final movie... at least on my PC). Overall I am happy with software. It allows me to burn DVDs without loss of quality.
Bottom Line: The smallest DVD quality camcorder on the market. I'm keeping it!
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