Like everything else in the electronic field, camcorders have been gradually shrinking in size. Yet there comes a point where a fine balance has to be struck between convenience and performance and JVC believes that its latest MiniDV has just about cracked it.
The Miniature series began in 1996 with the GR-DV1 and was quickly acclaimed for its sleekness and compactness of design - it was clearly intended to be slipped easily into a pocket, jacket or handbag. The GR-DVP9 keeps the cool, smooth lines of its predecessors while incorporating some new improvements.
Picture quality is, of course, the prime consideration and the GR-DVP9 has a high-density 1.33-megapixel CCD as well as a super high-band processor that calculates and restores the high-band components of the luminance signal that would normally be lost in conventional processing, raising the horizontal resolution to a maximum of 540 lines.
You'll be pleasantly surprised at the resulting clarity of picture from such a small piece of hardware. Unusually, in addition to the 2-inch fold-out LCD monitor, the camcorder comes with a colour viewfinder and the brightness of both the monitor and the viewfinder can be adjusted for more reliable shooting. The attached 'info-shoe' will also allow you to use an extra light source or stereo zoom microphone.
The usual kinds of wipe and fade effects come as standard, as do special effects like sepia, strobe and monochrome. The one innovation, though, is Night-Scope which boosts the sensitivity of the shutter speed by up to 30 times and will enable you to capture murky (possibly in more than one sense of the word) shots that you might previously have felt were beyond your reach. This feature works best, naturally, on a tripod as the effect frequently looks like its strobing and that's without the additional hazard of camera shake.
If you need an convincing that this camera is as much designed for fun as practical video recording, then the proof is in the variety of MP3 digital sound effects provided on the supplied memory card. You can now add everything from applause, cheering and laughter to explosions, buzzers and sirens to your recordings - which will be especially appreciated on stag and hen nights.
There's an incorporated Navigation feature which will make a thumbnail image of your last record point. This makes it easy both to go straight to the part of the tape you want to review again, and to decide where to edit or continue shooting from. The menu controls are housed in the hollow where the viewfinder folds in; it takes a while to master the correct pressure for the push-buttons.
The 10x optical zoom is more than sufficient for highly detailed close-ups and the 200x digital zoom produces impressive results at a distance. However, even with the digital image stabiliser engaged, you'll still need a steady hand to avoid the inevitable long distance wobble.
Fast data transfer to and from a computer is possible through the DV terminal and there's also a handy analogue input so you can dub non-digital material to MiniDV format. The USB interface will allow MPEG-1 streaming to a computer from which video CDs can be made, and by the same means the GR-DVP9 can be turned into a web-cam for teleconferencing or surveillance.
As you'd expect, the GR-DVP9 can also act as a digital still camera with four image size settings (from 640 x 480 to 1,600 x 1,200 pixels). At the highest resolution you can only store 9 images (in Fine mode) on the 8MB MultiMediaCard, but that expands to 165 in Standard mode on the lowest setting. Snapshots can be taken with sound effect on or off and there's even an MPEG-4 E-mail Video Clip recording function that can later be transferred via USB to your computer.
Bundled software includes Digital Photo Navigator for still image transfer, image re-sizing, slideshows, Web file creation and data library management, plus ImageMixer to help with MPEG-1 editing and the driver for USB video streaming.
