It's official: JVC GZ-MG505

[Darren Addy]

Award-winning vaporware becomes reality with the official announcement of the JVC Everio G Series GZ-MG505.

f/1.2 lens
Wide angle (35mm equivalent to 41.2mm)
9 hours of recording time at DVD Movie quality
USB 2.0 interface with Mac/Win compatibility
$1300?
No annoying tape changes at crucial moments? Priceless!

I think this one has to be put on the short list for storm chasers considering a DV cam. Faster transfers mean faster turnaround for the media/pro video guys out there. What say you?

Darren Addy
Kearney, NE

 

[Edward Ballou]

I couldn't find by reading in there anywhere if it had a swappable hard drive - now THAT would be awesome.

Other than that, wow. I'd like to see some picture quality from it first though.

 

[Joe Zemek]

I've been reading the camcorder lit as I'm about to spring for one, and I've read over & over that HDD camcorder res quality is Not There Yet (especially not for $1300). I am also looking forward to disk recording but will stick to MiniDV for now.

 

[Dan Robinson]

There are external capture-storage drives like the FireStore that you can hook up to any camera via the firewire ports and do direct-to-disk recording that way. You can still record to tape at the same time. Unfortunately at last check, the cheapest Firestore was around $800.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

IIRC, the miniDV format yields about 13GB of data per hour. So, in the same 30GB that the new camcorder uses for 9 hours of video, the minDV format would use for only 2.3 hours. That tells me that there is a lot of compression in the JVC camcorder, since you're cramming a lot more recorded time into the same 30GB of space. Of course, the description does say "DVD movide quality", which explain how they are able to cram 9hrs of video into 30GB (DVD video quality is less than minDV, obviously). I find it easier having tapes, since I can easily keep hours and hours of video without worrying about external hard drives... I only have a laptop, so it's not feasible for me to keep hours and hours of video on it. In addition, if I want to show others my video, I can just bust out the camcorder, put in the tape, and play it back on the TV. I'm not sure how well that'd work on these tape-less camcorders... I mean, if you want to play back old footage (say, from a chase last year), you'd need to either play it on the computer, or move it back onto the camcorder, then hook the camcorder up and play it on the TV (this assumes that you can move video back onto the camcorder).