EASY TO USE:
If you spend 10-minutes fooling around with the menu and all the buttons, you get the hang of it really quick. I will probably never use the advanced manual functions, but from the look of it manual function menus they seem easy to operate. I would, for this price, expect that there'd be a manual focus ring rather than a screen-based tool for manual focus. The buttons that you use the most like the zoom control, record button, and snapshot button, are in the right places. The camera overall is heavier than a SD camera but not bad at all. It feels sturdy and the battery doesn't add noticable heft to the device. Connecting to the TV with an HDMI cable is easy because it uses a real, full-size HDMI port and automatically activates it when you plug it in. This might be common to all camcorders, but you can use an HDMI hi-def TV as a huge viewfinder if you want... which potentially could be useful.

IMAGE CLARITY:
This is an HD camera, so naturally I expect the image quality to be very, very good. It is crisp but I feel as if it is a little bit grainy, especially in low light. I was not impressed by it at all and I'm highly considering returning it. The 3CCD system is supposed to reproduce the best colors but I felt as if reds and blues were muted - of course I'm no color theory-trained person. The first few times I used this were during a snow storm to record the beating we were getting here in Minneapolis and at an ice-skating rink. Not the two biggest color-rich environments but still I saw colors and details that the camera screen didn't see and to me, for an HD 3CCD camera, I feel it should have.

ZOOM & FOCUS:
The optical zoom operates at the right speed I'd say. The camera focuses fairly quickly, though I question why it doesn't go any faster. The big problem is, when you get passed approx. 6x it starts to lose its ability to focus up-close. So say you are sitting at your desk that is against a wall and you want to zoon in on the face of the person in the artwork on that wall. You zoom, zoom, zoom all the way to 10x which gets you close enough to fill the entire screen with the person's little face in the artwork. But it's blurry. The camera actually automatically backs-out the zoom until it is able to focus. I find that ridiculous. I zoomed in that far because I wanted to see the face of the person in the artwork fill the entire screen from the distance at which I was holding the camera. If you move the camera closer manually, it does a better job but is still obviously limited. I was dissapointed here.

LOW LIGHT:
I'm not expecting greatness in low light. I realize that top movie cameras even need lighting to capture people properly at light. But while at the ice skating rink, they turned the lights down low for that romantic feel (I suppose) and all of a sudden everyone's face disappeared and colors significantly reduced. It wasn't dark, it was amber-like; there was actually quite a bit of light remaining. I tried the night-mode which immediately increased the camera's ability to see light to where I think it should have been able to do w/out a setting but it became choppy and lost all use - the shutter speed slowed. Why in the world would I want the shutter speed to slow so much that the filming looks like I'm making a slasher movie - all choppy and traily. The only use of it is to plant the camera on a tripod and make people walk very slowly. It doesn't have that green-looking night-vision mode like Sonys do, which, even though its not in prestine color, allows you to see things happening at night, which is the point. The only time it does "well" at night is when there is a light bulb in the area and it picks up the light well from that for a certain distance away from the light source. Then it just sort of reverts back to its dismal low-light capability around the edges. I was dissapointed here.

Picture quality, focus, and low-light ability are like the kitchen and bathroom of a house. You can have just okay features otherwise, but if these features aren't great, you just don't have a good camera. I don't consider these features to be great, especially for a camera with an MSRP of over $1,000. I got it for $830 for Marcus Audio through Amazon.com. I think I'd be willing to pay $700 for it as it is.

I'll update you if I decide to return it (and let you know if Marcus Audio is a pain in the butt to return a product to). I need to see if the Sony or other brands are any better. I need something that is good in low light. I don't need the best colors at low-light, but I need to see faces. Problem is, trying to test these things without a salesperson looming over you at Best Buy or Circuit City is a pain because they never have power, they are usually screwed up because some kid took a billion pictures or videos with it and hit a bunch of buttons, or they are attached to an alarm system that keeps going off. Annoying. Hence my love of Amazon.com.

I love this camera!! It's very simple to use and has many features to support most video/photo adjustments the average person would want to make to take a great shot. My wife likes it and she's not particularly tech-savvy. I'm a software developer so I tend to do well with technology.

I was drawn to the camera because of the HDD digital storage and it seemed to be high quality when compared with others that I experimented with in it's class without being bulky, or having an awkward or complicated user interface. Once I discovered this unit at my favorite technology retail store, I did a lot of research on the device - its features and usability, and tried to find it's weaknesses from any professional review I could locate. I did all my searching on the Internet. What I found was that nearly all the reviews were raving when compared with others (it was a leader in major publishers). The weakness that was pointed out by only a few reviews was that it seems to have an ever so slight difficulty managing orange toned colors. Particularly in bad lighting. This was an acceptable downside to me considering how well it outperformed many other areas in autofocus, zoom, anti-wobble (stabilization for shaky hands), shutter speed, backlighting, flash (with anti-red-eye), color accuracy (despite the orange issue), viewfinder, user interface, digital storage speed, and quality of resulting video. The photography aspect doesn't come lacking either. However, the orange issue applies also to stills. BTW, (reviewer note) this is more apparent to me since the interior of my house is painted with earth tones. The camera doesn't have any trouble at all in natural (outdoor) lighting.

The camera's hard drive also has a shock-proof feature to protect the hard drive in a fall, an input jack for an optional external microphone, 10x/40x/300x zoom, and several other features. Another professional review was displeased with the built in microphone (I haven't noticed this problem). But that's certainly eliminated with the optional external microphone and mount-point. Another great usability feature is that the most common scene capture adjustments you would want to make can be set from a mini on-screen popup menu, the more uncommonly used adjustments are made via the main menu. The popup menu can be accessed and adjusted during video recording (which would also be noticed on the resulting video).

One downside I have encountered is that the file output is not a common output format (perhaps it is to support higher quality video recordings). MOD is this file format. I don't know what that is so I end up converting all my movies to MPG. If I didn't have a way to record a script on my computer this batch conversion process would have been very frustrating and time consuming.

The user manual was straight-forward and thorough. I read the whole thing in a few sittings when I bought it and have been very glad I did. I couldn't have gotten up to speed with it nearly so fast. Firstly, the user interface has very few controls, very few buttons. That's what I wanted, but it meant that I would have to learn to navigate the menus in order to know where to find what I wanted to execute it quickly in live action. The manual certainly met my needs in that area. So there is a learning curve. It's been 15 months (birth of our first-born) since I bought it and I'll be returning to the manual for a refresher on those infrequently used features which could be helping me and I've simply forgotten.

Overall, the camera is easy to adjust and get into the action quickly. I personnally dislike having to make a party wait for the camera man to adjust his (complicated) camera. I didn't want to be that camera man. This camera has been an excellent fit.

I know the 3CCD is a major innovation but I don't remember much about it - but it takes great videos and pictures. I certainly recommend it, but I
can't give it 5 stars for the orange tone management. Probably a 4.5!!

Bought the camera 1 month ago from Amazon. Easy to use and download software (I'm not a techi). I needed to spend some time to get used to the editing software with the camera, but now I can use most basic functions. Microphone can pick up any adjustments you make to the camera while filming, so just try to use adjustments sparingly. Excellent HD camera for the price. Happy with the purchase and will probably upgrade camera with microphone to help pick up speeches etc...

This camera is absolute quality. I love the large lens, the great features, the comfortable handling, and the sharpenss of the footage. 60gb allows for up to 5 hours of HD footage, which is incredible. The stock battery may only last about 1-2 hours of use, but I'm surprised how long the first charge actually lasted. Quality, even at 10x zoom is great, and there is some noise in low-light conditions, but filming without proper lighting is asking a little much.

Overall, I'm very happy about this purchase, and I would recommend it for anyone looking to buy a great camera for every day use, or even for filming small movies for fun.

I was very much curious to see my new camcorder. I already have a Sony DCR DVD108 camcorder with me, which is nothing but an SD camcorder but wanted to go for HD with HDD, with all the reading I decided to go for this camcorder.

Once I was back from office I thought of taking a tour. I took it out for a shoot. At around 5PM with ambient sunlight video quality was good but wanted to see how would that come out in my Laptop, so plugged it in but none of the video player supported the format of the movie. Was disappointed, then thought of taking night shot, this is where i started disliking it. There was sufficient amount of light in the room and out side too, but the video was appearing to be dull, so went into manual mode and tried to increase the exposure, ohh no change. There is a option where in the video capture increases to a drastic extent I guess it is the night mode (but not specified in the option list) when I switched over to this video was pathetic, it was so blur and a slight movement would distort the image.

One more thing, when you are recording in a silent sight you would hear extra noise out of it no clue where the hell it is coming from.

Thinking of returning it back.

Impressive fit and finish, easy-to-use features, image quality is good under daylight, but poor in a low-light environment. I paid $530 on Amazon in August '08 so it's a good value.

This Camcorder is pathethic.... First off, Digital Stabilization is the worst Idea Next to Intrapolated Pictures for higher Megapixels on your digital camera.... and it works about the same... Unfortunately you can't turn that off in Auto Mode, and Manual mode is too hard for anyone who doesn't know the camera to use... Lack of viewfinder is a lost cause if you plan on shooting anything at higher speeds... Like rc airplanes....

and why the heck would they force interlaced video... It sucks... it Looks terrible viewed on my 50" lcd hdtv.... I have to first convert everything over to deinterlaced... Also to strip the extra byte off their format to make it reg mpg you need to import it into powerdirector it will conver/strip the encoding off and leave you with a regular mpg (no conversion or re-compression)

I would have bought the Canon hd10, but the speed of the zoom on the canon was slower than a snail, but video on the canon looked much better... I should have just put up with the slow zoom... at least the canon stays in focus that way...

PS, the $400 minidvd camcorders Have Way better stabilization... this camera just isn't very usable... it prob isn't worth a dime... Skip JVC and buy the canon...

I've been using this camera solidly for nearly 2 years and I find it to be very useful and think the images look amazing for it's price. It's light and small and I carry it with me everywhere I want to shoot without having to lug too much stuff around.

The TOD format that it records in is just MPG and you can simply rename the file extension - it's annoying but I wrote a little one line shell script to rename the files which I can then work on in any standard editing program. While there are complaints of a lack of view finder I cannot see the point of it and find the 16x9 screen to be simply awesome.

Also the night mode that some have complained about is actually really good! Sure it's choppy if you're hand holding but on a tripod it really comes into its own and brings some great colour into very dark shots with very little ambient light. I highly recommend working in dark settings with a manual aperture setting rather than relying on the auto mode. Let's face it, if you're hand holding in night mode and expect things to be smooth your expectations of a camera in this price range are far too high and you really need to lay down a hell of a lot more money for your HD camera purchase.

My only real annoyance is not really the camera's fault but a fault in HDD cameras in general. The microphone (which is actually pretty good) tends to record the noise of the hard drive as it records in really quiet settings. This can be greatly diminished with a hotshoe mic or removed altogether with a external mic however. Any serious videoing should incorporate these accessories anyway.

Overall a great amateur HD camera that is both robust and handy while producing some wonderful HD footage providing you take the short amount of time to learn its capabilities.

I bought this as a second camera for some corporate testimonials. It has been a huge pain trying to find any of the features I need, if they exist at all. The autofocus is choppy and never really locks on. So, usability, pretty terrible.

But even on top of that, back at my computer, I try importing the videos into Final Cut Express 4 (FCE), and the files are the silly and useless .TOD files (why no .MOVs, JVC?). I search the web looking for a converter, or a way to import them. I find a FAQ on JVCs website which tells me I have to download and install 3 separate files from 3 separate places, and one of the links is all in another language and the link is bad. Essentially, I am at a loss now. There are a million .TOD to .MOV converter websites, but they all look super shady. So my options now are try downloading some shifty-looking third party software just to use these files, or not use them at all. JVC has put me in a seriously crappy situation. I will be returning this device immediately, and hopefully I can find a way to still use these files.

In summary: "HEY, THIS JVC CAMCORDER IS ON SALE. SHOULD I BUY IT?" Answer: "No! It's like buying a car that only takes gas sold at one gas station, 200 miles away. It doesn't matter what the car does if you can't use it."

Excellent camera. I'm very happy with the amazing quality video. I would buy it again!