Digital Trends

Sharp VL-Z7U August 5th, 2003 | by Mike Bell

Video Quality

The video quality of the VL-Z7U was quite good under most conditions. In addition to the default automatic settings and the manual settings, there is a scene menu with six preprogrammed recording modes. Each of the scene modes automatically sets the exposure, white balance, and shutter speed for the type of scene being recorded.

·                     Sport: Scenes with a lot of motion such as sporting events.

·                     Dusk: Twilight and sunset

·                     Sunlight: Scenes with bright sunlight

·                     Party: Variable illumination — spotlights, candles

·                     Night Lumi: Scenes with an illuminated object in the dark - fireworks

·                     Slow Shut: to make an object in dim lighting appear bright.

Default (Scene Mode off), Sport, and Party were used the most during evaluation of the VL-Z7U. Default was usually fine for outdoors in sunlight, and Party seemed to provide realistic capture of illuminated indoor scenes without giving the appearance of over-brightening. The default mode; however, was disappointing for indoor scenes with low lighting. A higher dynamic range in the default mode would be nice so that the menu system would not need to be accessed when moving between indoors and outdoors while recording is in progress.

In low light conditions, a noticeable amount of graininess was always present whether using one of the pre-programmed modes or the manual settings.    

The auto-focus system was spot-on in all but very low light conditions.

With adequate lighting, colors were rendered accurately and with very good contrast. While recording a flower garden on a bright day, a strand of spider web could be clearly seen extending from a bright red flower to a nearby bush.

The digital image stabilization worked fine. The only complaint once again was the necessity for navigating the menu system in order to turn off the digital stabilization when a scene transitioned from little motion to relatively more motion.  

Still Camera Mode

 The VL-Z7U contains a still camera mode that permits still photos to be taken and stored on tape or on the included memory card. The memory card or tape is selected with a media selection switch on the back of the camcorder above the standby button. Additionally, a frame from a video recording can be selected with pause during playback and transferred to the memory card.

The number of photos that can be stored on the included SD memory card ranges between 20 and 160 depending upon the selected resolution (640x480 & 1280x960) and picture quality setting (fine, normal, economy.)

Still photos taken in bright sunlight exhibited very good color. However, the clarity of the still photos was less than expected from a > 1Mpixel image sensor. An extended period of experimenting finally convinced me that the problem was not operator error or even an auto-focus error, which was originally suspected.

The VL-Z7U contains a built-in flash for still photos and can be set to off, automatic or flash-always. The VL-Z7U includes the expected re-eye reduction feature. What appears to be a connector for an external flash is actually the mount for an optional zoom microphone. The flash resulted in good exposure in all but very low lighting conditions. Here the graininess that was present in low-light video recordings was again quite noticeable.

Over all, the still photo performance of the VL-Z7U was very disappointing, especially since the feature was so nicely integrated into the camcorder.