JVC GR-D290 review

Features
Though the JVC GR-D290 includes a 25x optical zoom, impressive for a camera in its price class, the lens sits in front of a small 680,000-pixel CCD. Still, the GR-D290 does include a number of features more typical of higher-priced cameras.

The camera can shoot photos interpolated to as much as 1,024x768 pixels and save them to an SD or MMC card (not included). There's no built-in flash, but you can turn on the video light when shooting stills

In addition to automatic exposure and exposure-shift adjustments, there's a spot-exposure feature. You can also manually set the shutter speed or choose Sports, Snow, Spotlight or Twilight scene modes. For more stylised shooting, you'll find sepia, black-and-white, classic film, strobe and mirror effects. The camera also includes nine built-in fader effects and a pair of wide-screen modes: Cinema, which letterboxes the image, and Squeeze, which uses the full CCD and compresses the image to match a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Other features include manual and automatic white-balance control and focus, as well as backlight compensation. The Night Alive feature lets you shoot in dark settings while maintaining colour, with the significant compromise of slow shutter speed. A pair of LED lights helps illuminate dark subjects that are very close to the camera. The Live Slow feature snaps a 1.5-second segment in slow motion while maintaining real-time audio -- an odd, if interesting, effect. And for the short-attention-span generation, the 5S mode automatically stops recording 5 seconds after you press the record button, guaranteeing your viewers will never be bored by a scene dragging out for a full 10 seconds.

There's a built-in stereo microphone on the front of the camera but no jack for an external microphone or a pair of headphones. There's also no accessory shoe, but JVC does offer wide-angle and telephoto lens attachments, as well as a step-up ring for attaching 37mm lenses to the GR-D290's 27mm-lens mount. The GR-D290 includes analogue video outputs but no inputs, so you can't use it convert old analogue tapes to digital format.

Performance
The JVC GR-D290 is, for the most part, a good performer. It's very responsive and quick to adjust focus, white balance and exposure when panning to a new subject. There were times when the autofocus took a couple of seconds to lock onto the subject in the centre of the screen, and in dim conditions, the camera sometimes had trouble finding focus when the lens was zoomed in.

The standard battery lasting just under an hour for normal shooting. JVC includes a second battery in the package, doubling your shooting capacity between recharges