Customer Reviews

JVC GRDV3000U MiniDV Digital Cybercam with 3.5" LCD, 16 MB SD Memory Card & High Res Color Viewfinder

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I purchased this camera not to long ago so I'm still new to it. Video is pretty good and adjusts to light well. Optical zoom (10x) is nice, but digital does degrade video as with all cameras. I'm happy with still pictures and found out I had set resolution to the third highest level. I will be even happier to see the ones I take on highest level. I bought a few extra memory cards so I can continue taking pictures. 16mb that comes with camera is nice to begin with, but some space is taken up with special effects (sounds). As with most cameras, I'll be checking into extra battery. S-video in and out can be a nice feature seeing I'll be putting home video onto dvd or cvd. Viewer screen is nice size for reviewing and showing pictures or video. Loaded with features that I haven't had a chance to use yet, and you can put camera into total manual and manual focus for videoing far away with other things moving in front where autofocus would be trying to compensate. Onscreen controls are easy to use. DV port to sony laptop took some time to get to work, but heard of alot of people having problems with this with other cameras and computers. Happy so far.

I finally went HD last year, but my old JVC workhorse is hard to let go of, and I still have it. It's a great wedding cam with its 1-lux low light rating. I pretty much never had to use gain for anything ever. I have shots of the moon and stars with no gain that are breathtaking. No, it doesn't have optical image stabilization, but by the time this cam came out, electronic stabilization had gotten just as good. The only flaw this cam has (and every cam seems to have at least a couple of things it could do better) is that the auto-focus could be a bit quicker in a run & gun situation. I have gotten some vignetting on really sharp edges such as guitar strings, but that's fairly common with SD interlaced cams. Overall the images this things shoots are incredible. It also mimics film quite well in digital wide mode. It's a very sturdy model too. I've never dropped mine, but I get the feeling it would take quite a fall to break this thing. It doesn't have XLR inputs, but when this cam came out, those were only found on cams costing $3,000 and up. The internal stereo mic is quite good though, especially outdoors. That's one of the reasons I've kept the cam so long. I've used it to record nature sounds for my sound collection for several years. It does a better job than any of my other mics, and I've been doing sound engineering work since the 80s. At the prices these cams go for on the used market, a guy could do a whole lot worse than a JVC GR DV-3000.

Camera will not work for extended time when going from air conditioned area to high humidity (as on ships deck in the Carib.) Tape gets stuck quite a bit and gets frustrating also! (I assume same reason) Great filming otherwise.

everything is nice,except the most important feature: challenge with exporting movies from the camcoder to the computer. Pentium 4 processor is highly recommended and it seems that all the files (no matter what quality you choose, refer to the manual) are at MPEG1 compression which practically renders them UNUSABLE! It takes cca 250MB of memory per one minute at normal quality! Everything else is impressive (don't get upset about the manuals and support, it could be better).