Digital Trends

JVC Everio S GZ-MS100 June 16th, 2008 | by David Elrich

Performance and Use

The JVC Everio S GZ-MS100 starts quickly since there’s no tape or disc to move into recording position. In less than 3 seconds the screen sprang to life and the camcorder was ready to record. As always I began in the basic auto position with the digital zoom turned off (it hits 800x) and took some footage. When I did so I pressed the Upload button since this limits the amount of recording to 10 minutes, the longest amount for YouTube vids.

New Jersey was suffering from a brutal pre-summer heat wave so I drove down to the Navesink River town of Red Bank to see how the MS100 captured the water, anchored boats and colorful shops. Even though the photos are only 640 x 480, I tried them out as well. The MS100 is very easy to operate although the Laser Touch takes a fine touch for accuracy. Moving through the menus in auto and manual is also simple. The camcorder has six Program AE scene modes (Night, Portrait, Sports and so on). Since there was no “Sand” I tried “Snow” on a day the temp hit 100-plus. It really didn’t work but nothing ventured… Going beyond simple Auto there are a number of manual options including focus, white balance, shutter speed plus in Photometry you can choose a section of the viewfinder to adjust brightness or it does it for the entire screen. These adjustments are made using Laser Touch and it works fairly well as you tweak the settings. Many of these options are available for shooting stills.

Image Courtesy of JVC

Once I made a dent in the SDHC card it was time check out my efforts on the big screen and then upload some videos to YouTube. My Panasonic plasma has an SD card slot so it just took a few clicks of the remote to see a slide show of stills and scroll through the video scenes. I wasn’t really surprised by what I saw—the videos were decent, nothing more with little of the detail you see on today’s quality high-def camcorders. However, you’re not paying a grand with the GZ-MS100 so these are unrealistic expectations. For DVD-level they were acceptable with fairly accurate colors, little smearing and not too much digital noise with material shot with plenty of light. To get a bit more richness, I lowered the brightness levels. When you move indoors there’s a lot more noise and the tiny light is no help for full room shots but it earns its pay with close-ups that are tack sharp. Focusing was fast with little drift and the digital image stabilization did a fair job smoothing out the shakes. Sound was lifelike and the speaker is a bit too accurate as it picks up the noise from the zoom. You won’t notice it if you’re taking shots with more ambient noise than sailboats going by!

Now it was time to upload some videos from the camcorder after installing the PowerCinema software on my PC which runs XP Pro. After connecting via USB and opening the LCD screen, you use the Laser Touch control to engage the Upload command. At that point your videos are transferred by PowerCinema. When all the scene thumbnails appear on your monitor you click YouTube on the left of the screen, place check boxes on the thumbnails you want the world to see and start sharing. The program asks for your YouTube log-in name and password (or asks you to open an account) then a virtual keyboard pops-up to log onto your YouTube account. You then follow the steps to Broadcast Yourself. After the upload and a visit to the YouTube site after a relaxing glass of iced coffee, I checked out my work. David Lean I’m not but still giving others the chance to see clips is fun—it’s easy to understand why zillions of people do it every day. I do have a problem though—JVC calls it a One Touch YouTube Upload but it’s hardly one click.

Conclusion

So this boils down to a decent, lightweight standard-def 35x zoom camcorder with software that makes uploading to YouTube relatively simple. There are many other less expensive gadgets that let you post to YouTube but quality is pretty weak. At least with the JVC Everio S GZ-MS100 you’re getting a camcorder rather than a glorified disposable camera. Since this baby is brand new (as of June 2008) the price hasn’t dipped below $349 USD. If you want a pretty cool gadget and the world to share your pratfalls, by all means go for it!

Pros:

• Light SDHC standard-def camcorder
• Decent video quality
• 35x optical zoom



Cons:

• Hardly a “One-Touch” upload to YouTube
• Feels flimsy
• Low-quality stills