Digital Trends

JVC Everio GZ-HD7

June 10th, 2007 | by David Elrich

Testing and Use

The GZ-HD7 uses MPEG-2 Transport Stream (TS) encoding and at the best setting records 1920 x 1080i video. If the five hours of storage aren’t enough, you can move to SP for seven hours total. It uses three 570K-pixel progressive CCDs to record video. In most cases three chips are better than one since each is dedicated to a specific color (red, green, blue), resulting in more accurate colors. In the case of the HD Everio, the quality was good in bright light but was not as accurate as the single chip 2.96MP Canon HV20. In dark scenes, particularly those shot indoors, there was a lot of noise—again the HV20 was better.

Controls are logically placed, making it easy to change modes and settings. The camcorder has a 10x Fujinon zoom that moves through the range quickly and has little trouble grabbing focus, even in dark scenes. Like any camcorder, the new HD Everio records in Auto, the simple point-and-record mode the vast majority of consumers use. In fact, when you’re in Auto, you can do little more than change the zoom—all others options are locked out. Moving beyond Auto takes a very moderate learning curve, mastering the manual options such as focus, compensation, aperture and so on as well as navigating the menu system. I particularly liked the focus ring that helps you zero in on your subject. Definitely keep the Owner’s Manual nearby when you first take it for a spin.

I shot similar scenes with the JVC and Canon HV20 and while you’d be happy with the GZ-HD7 by itself, side by side—or more accurately, one after the other—the Canon was the best. This was especially noticeable in low light scenes which the HV20 handled with less noise. And this was without using a color enhancement light.

Overall video quality was good, not breath-taking, something you could say about the Canon HDV footage—especially shot outdoors. Indoors there was a more yellowish cast than the HV20 and colors were not as realistic. Outdoors, the green leaves of rustling leaves were very distinct and there was barely a spec of noise in the blue skies. The camcorder handled blues quite well (especially skies and water) but had trouble making reds pop—they were a bit muted for my liking. Also Canon’s optical image stabilization system worked better. There was barely any jitter with the HV20 while it was much more noticeable for the HD Everio. As noted earlier, this camcorder has a Zebra setting, something found on pro-level models. What this does is help you adjust brightness levels for white objects.

Like almost all camcorders, the GZ-HD7 takes digital stills as well but they’re 1920 x 1080 in the 16:9 mode. There is no built-in flash so indoor shots are grainy yet those taken in bright light were acceptable. In other words, don’t expect to make 13x19 prints from these files. Overall quality was O.K., and acceptable for viewing on an HDTV.

The key issue with any HDD-based camcorder is this—how do you get the video off the hard drive so you can share it? Hitachi came up with the novel idea of a standard definition hybrid featuring hard disc and DVD drives so you can simply port your footage to disc without a computer, then play it back on your DVD player. High-definition video complicates this quite a bit since combo HDD/Blu-ray Disc camcorders are still an engineer’s dream in a Japanese lab.

In a perfect world, the buyer of the HD Everio has a Blu-ray burner in their PC or Mac as well as a Blu-ray player hooked up to a HDTV. The supplied software lets you burn BD discs. And the extended family has them too so they can enjoy the high-def footage. Since this is not a perfect world, JVC has a reasonable interim solution, the $399 USD Share Station. You connect the GZ-HD7 to it, load a DVD-R/-RW disc and it’ll copy HD Data Files to disc so you can offload your video. You then can watch those discs through the Share Station via a HDMI connection to your TV. This doesn’t help the family but what can you do; they just have to make the move to BD. No one said being on the cutting edge of technology was a poor person’s game. 

Conclusion

As a fan of HDD and high-def camcorders, I really wanted to like this one a lot. Its form factor and control layout are excellent. The manual adjustments take this up a big notch compared to competitors. And the amount of storage is amazing. That said, it is expensive and the video in less-than-optimal conditions was not as outstanding as one would expect from a HD camcorder. And the optical image stabilization wasn’t that effective, especially when compared to the recently reviewed Canon HV20. My dream camcorder at this stage is the HD Everio that delivers Canon-level video and has that company’s OIS. Somehow I don’t think I’m going to see that collaboration. And so the search for the ultimate sub-$1,500 USD HD camcorder goes on.

Pros:

• Good, not great video quality
• Five-hour capacity (best resolution)
• Excellent manual options
• Attractive form factor

Cons:

• No AF Assist lamp, flash or light
• Offloading and storing HD video
• Expensive