JVC GZ-MG20 camcorder

Posted by T3 Online on Fri 19 Oct 2007

It's point, click and straight to disk for this camcorder.

Who wants to mess around with tapes when you can shoot video directly to a hard drive? Not us, which is why we've been throwing out our camcorder cassettes and yelling from the treetops like rabid monkeys about the benefits of JVC's tapeless shooters. The more expensive Everio models have been top banana, but can this paired-down version hang tough with its pricier siblings?

This model may be the baby of the bunch, but at £600 it's not cheap, so it's good to see you get a solid piece of kit, albeit a rather black and square one. To cut the price, JVC has had to equip it with a smaller hard drive than you'll find on its pricier siblings.

There's enough room on the disk for up to 20 hours of footage, but on the higher settings - which produce DVD-quality footage - you only really get around 4.5 hours of recording time. It should still be enough for most people - it's certainly more holiday footage than we could ever sit through - but if you're not planning to regularly offload the video to a PC, it could be a problem.

At least JVC has come through on performance. Video is crisp and natural at the higher settings, and colour and contrast are in visible abundance.

But there are other shortcomings. The sound recording is less than impressive and the poor stills performance really grates. When most camcorders can take megapixel shots, this model's maximum resolution of 640 x 480 is a joke for £600.

None of this would matter if the superior models were out of reach, but the next one up, the GZ-MG30, costs just £50 more and has a larger hard drive. So we'd advise you not to monkey around and go for that one instead.