JVC Everio GZ-MS100

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http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/camcorders/0,39029967,49299511,00.htm

Reviewed 30 October 2008

Reviewed by Joshua Goldman

The big YouTube sticker on back of this camcorder's LCD and the YouTube branding on the box are kind of a giveaway: JVC's Everio GZ-MS100 is a compact, budget SD-card-based camcorder capitalising on the trend of one-touch video upload to the Internet. Its other main selling point is the Laser Touch interface, which attempts to inject some gee-whiz factor into an otherwise staid operation, namely navigating the setting menus. It's available now for around £170.

Design
Taking its design cues from the Everio G series hybrid camcorders, the MS100 (part of the Everio S series) is smaller at 53mm wide by 69mm high by 112mm deep. Its traditional horizontal body design is atypical of the fashionable YouTube camcorders, which tend toward the shape and size of a deck of cards. This does mean the MS100 is bigger and heavier (though it weighs only 224 grams), but it allows for a debatably useful 35x zoom lens and a higher-resolution 680,000-pixel CMOS sensor (340,000 effective) compared with VGA-resolution (307,200 pixels) on most of those models.

Even as small as the MS100 is, it's very comfortable to use and does look and feel good, despite being entirely plastic. The battery takes up most of the back -- there's just enough room for the record start/stop button to the right of it. On top are the zoom rocker and a snapshot button. You can't take stills while shooting video, but instead need to flip a tiny switch on the left side of the body. Photos are 640x480 and are of typical quality for SD camcorders -- good enough for the Web at small sizes, barely.

Above that switch sits a button to flip between play and record, and below it is one for changing out of Auto mode to Manual. Then there's the ballyhooed one-touch Upload button and its partner Direct DVD button. This one-button YouTube upload, though, really just connects, transcodes and uploads via the bundled Cyberlink software (Windows only). It certainly doesn't relieve you of having to be in front of your computer to keep the process moving start to finish.

This is not really any different than the MS100's competitors, except that some of them have the software built into the camcorder so you don't have to worry about where the software's installed.

Features
Down the left side of the flip-out 69mm (2.7-inch) LCD is a touch-sensitive strip that sort of takes the place of a joystick or directional pad. However, those generally have five directions used for selecting things. The strip, while responsive and pretty -- it lights up a brilliant blue when stroked -- only handles scrolling up and down, or adjusting focus, exposure and shutter speed in Manual mode.

Below the display are five Laser Touch buttons: OK/display, three which are context-sensitive, and Menu. We're sure that after a couple of months you'll have no problem remembering to go from Menu to OK to scrolling to OK to scrolling to OK to scrolling and to OK one last time, but for us it seemed like too much jumping around to change the white-balance setting.

Aside from all the menu diving, the Manual mode is definitely a plus for the MS100. It's also what you have to be in to access scene programs like Sports, Snow, Spotlight and Night. By the way, little of this is discussed in the skimpy user guide.

The camcorder records MPEG-2 video to SD/SDHC cards. The Ultra Fine setting comes in at 8.5Mbps, giving you a little less than 15 minutes for every 1GB of storage. Honestly, it's the only setting you'd want to record at with the MS100, but there are more options going down the scale, including Eco, at 1.5Mbps for up to nearly 20 hours of recording time on a 16GB SDHC card.

Performance
If you stick to the intended use of sharing video on the Web and you primarily plan to shoot outdoors during daylight, the MS100 will produce satisfying results. Viewed on full screen on a computer monitor shows the abundant blocky artefacts and noise, but taken down to YouTube proportions the results are considerably better, save for some high-contrast fringing.

Colours are pleasing, with acceptable white balance in natural light. Indoors is another story, as the overall results are not all that enjoyable and there's no option to change to incandescent or fluorescent presets. There is a manual white balance that you can tweak for better results and a halogen setting, for correcting the light from the weak built-in LED at the front of the camcorder.

A couple other things are worth mentioning. There's no optical image stabilisation -- just digital -- so extending out to 10x, let alone 35x, results in a shaky mess without a tripod. The zoom rocker itself tends toward touchy, but with some practice it can be steadily controlled. Also, there's a wind-cut filter you can turn on for the stereo mic under the lens, but it proved to be just about useless.

Conclusion
The JVC Everio GZ-MS100 should satisfy a majority of budget-conscious users who want a small flash memory-card-based camcorder that's simple and can upload videos easily to the Web. People who intend to view video on a TV or even in full-screen mode on a computer monitor will not be happy with this model, however.

Edited by Marian Smith