JVC Everio GZ-MC500 review

The 4GB drive bundled with the MC500 will hold around 60 minutes of digital video. You can bolster this by buying additional Microdrives. Provided you dock the MC500 with a computer between 60-minute shooting sessions, it's possible to upload footage and make do with the single 4GB drive.

JVC has bundled a USB cable with the MC500, but if you're transferring a lot of footage, you'll be screaming out for FireWire support. USB 2.0 is no slouch, but it still can't match FireWire for speed or convenience. We'd love to see JVC make the switch to this format with future revisions of the MC500.

When you've shot video on the MC500, clips are listed in a thumbnail index which lets you play back scenes. The bundled AV cable mirrors the LCD display on a TV so that you can screen clips for friends.

Performance
The MC500 is a cinch to operate. Everyone we showed this camcorder to could switch it into recording mode and shoot video within a few seconds. There are very few settings that require a rummage in the manual to activate -- the on-screen menu design is very intuitive. The only significant annoyance is a momentary lag when you first switch the MC500 on. This only lasts a few seconds, but it's enough of a delay to mean that the camera might not be ready to capture a fleeting event.

As is the case with the MC200, the MC500 has impressive image stabilisation. Panning the camera laterally across a scene, the motion is remarkably smooth. It reminded us of the kind of action you expect from a fully fledged Steadycam attachment. Because smaller camcorders are less of a weight burden, your hand is more likely to shake during use. This electronic stabilisation system is partly designed to compensate for any jiggling motion. Tracking shots are smoothed out, but extremely tight zooms are still messy unless you use a tripod.

We achieved a maximum recording time of around 60 minutes with the MC500. This almost exactly matches the recording capacity of the bundled Microdrive. If you need to shoot for longer than one hour, you'll need to consider extra batteries. As with all camcorders, if you're especially frugal with the zoom controls, you can improve this shooting time fractionally.

Despite JVC's almost supernatural attention to detail elsewhere on the MC500, the camcorder does have one extremely annoying quirk: footage is recorded to the internal Microdrive in a proprietary MPEG-2-PS format. This makes it difficult to use a mainstream editing tool like Premiere, iMovie or Final Cut Pro to cut your video. Although JVC bundles basic editing software with the MC500, it won't satisfy anyone who wants their films to sparkle.

If you want to import footage from the MC500 into a mainstream editing suite, you'll need to run codec conversion software to translate the MPEG-2 format. This is a relatively technical procedure that involves getting hold of some third-party tools to decode and then re-encode the video. As you've probably guessed, this won't do wonders for the video quality.

Image quality
Footage shot in daylight on the MC500 plays back crisply and brightly with deep colours and excellent contrast. The 3CCD-based design delivers a better picture than the single CCD of the MC200. We found skin tones especially convincing and the MC500 copes well with high-contrast scenes, especially with more tricky exposures like scenes where subjects are shot against bright skies. Night time and other poorly lit scenes are less impressive -- there's some motion blurring because of the low shutter speeds used to compensate. However, people are discernable even in very low light and the MC500's built-in light goes some way towards clearing up night shots.

While the MC500 can't hope to match larger 3CCD camcorders, footage has a very presentable, near-broadcast quality appearance when shot in adequate light. As you would expect from a 3CCD model, improved colour accuracy is the overwhelming reason to choose the MC500 over a single CCD microdrive camcorder. The improved picture quality over the MC200 is considerable.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide