Excellent camcorder at a great price!
This is a wonderful compact camcorder for filming family and sporting events. I prevously had a Sony handcam which uses DV tapes but it finally broke down after 10+ years. This JVC camcorder is about 1/4 the size and weight of my previous one so it's handy to put into my purse. I also looked at the new Sony handycams but I was not impressed by their image stabilization. The JVC camcorders were much better. The controls are pretty easy to operate. I read the manual front to back but I was able to show my husband how to use the basic controls in 5 minutes. He probably could have figured it out himself since it's fairly intuitive. I like how the camcorder turns on automatically when you open the screen. We tape our daughter's gymnastic competitions so the 45X zoom is fantastic since the equipment is usually far from the spectators. The zoom button is a little hard to operate with your right finger since it's also holding the camcorder but you can also zoom using the screen. The picture quality is fine if you want better you might want to get the HD version. For the price it's definitely a good buy.
The only disappointment for me is that JVC camcorders output in their proprietary .MOD format which is not readable on my old MAC 10.4x Tiger OS. I found a s/w program that supposedly converts various formats that the MAC can read but the output resolution was awful. I ended up using the JVC supplied Pixela s/w to create a DVD that I can play on the TV. The Pixela s/w is OK and you have to do some reading in order to figure out what you want to do but it does the job. I wish I can use iMovie on the MAC since it has more features and is easier to use.
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