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Reviewed by UK Guest, 12th Sep 2004. |
| Review Summary: A little gem, only slighlty flawed. |
Overall Score: 4/5
 
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Review: This JVC GR-D53EK MiniDV is a nice compact camcorder, comfortable to hold, solidly built and with nicely arranged controls which make it easy to use.
One of my few quibbles is with the digital image stabiliser: It'll improve maybe one shot in ten - the ones where you're trying to hold the camera very still, and succeeding reasonably well - but if you wobble the camera just a little too much, or pan or track at all, it'll give you a very jerky result. It would be nice to have the option to switch it off but the only way to do that is to put the camera into 'manual' mode, and then any other manual settings you may have selected come into operation too; low light modes and such. On the plus side, it is very effective indeed when using the zoom lens at its longest. As long as you have somewhere to rest your hands or elbows to keep it reasonably steady in the first place, you can get an amazingly steady image at the top end of the zoom, making this a very nice camera for wildlife filming.
Speaking of the zoom lens, the optical zoom goes up to 16x, very impressive indeed for a camera this size, and very useful. The digital zoom goes up to 700x but all this does of course is enlarge the centre of the image, though there is an option to limit the zoom to 40x, which gives acceptable results. The autofocus is a little sluggish so you have to zoom in slowly and carefully if you want it to keep up, but the manual-focus option can be turned on at a touch as an alternative.
The wide end of the zoom range a little narrower than on some cameras, giving the sense that it's still zoomed in just a little, even when it isn't. This limits your creative options when filming in confined indoor areas, though this is easily fixed by buying a wide-angle lens attachment, which needn't be a major expense.
Another massive selling point for anyone interested in editing or moving on from an analog camera is that it has an analog-in facility, meaning you can record onto the camera from VHS or from an older camera; in effect you can convert your old footage to DV and then edit it on your PC. This is a serious bonus, since it still costs most of £300 to get an analog capture card - this way you get a camcorder thrown in-!
Image quality: like all DV camcorders the image is perfect, indistiguishable from a good TV picture in good light. It also gives good results in low light on the whole but the so-called colour night view, designed to allow filming in almost no light at all, works by utilising a slower shutter speed to get the required light, all the way down to one about frame per second if necessary, to judge from the results I've had. However you can still get good results in everything down to low pub lighting without having to resort to that.
The only other downside that I've discovered is the modest battery life. The battery that comes with it will struggle to get through a single tape. I recommend buying a second, more powerful, battery if you're gong to be out all day doing a lot of filming, though these don't come cheap. Also the camera itself serves as a charger - one less gizmo to carry around but it means you can't charge one battery while you're using another.
So - a few things I'd change but on the whole, very satisfied and highly recommended, especially for the price. |
Ratings
| Value For Money: |
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4 |
| Review Score: |
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4 |
| Recommended? | |
Yes |
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Digital Cameras