JVC Everio GZ-MG21
JVC Everio GZ-MG21 Press Release
JVC’s breakthrough Everio G Series of hard drive camcorders gets even better for 2006, with new features that deliver enhanced performance and make hard drive video recording more attractive than ever.
Among the Everio innovations for this year is direct DVD burning, making it possible to create DVDs without a PC using a new JVC DVD burner or JVC-recommended burners from other manufacturers (compatible models will be posted to the JVC website). In addition, the transfer speed has been significantly increased, and a 32X optical zoom, a 2.7-inch widescreen LCD and an F1.2 lens are available on selected models.
JVC’s Everio G Series camcorders, the world’s first hard drive camcorders, eliminate the need to carry tapes, discs or any media at all, yet can record up to seven hours of DVD movie-quality video or more than 10 hours at DVD camcorder-quality on a built-in hard disc drive. Other advantages of hard drive video recording include the ability to quickly locate desired material, to effortlessly delete unwanted material and to easily rearrange playback sequence. The ground-breaking Everio G Series garnered several awards, including the Sound & Vision Editors’ Choice Award, Men’s Health 100 Best New Products For Men, Popular Science “Best of What’s New†and the CES Innovations 2006 Design & Engineering award.
For 2006, JVC is introducing two new 20GB models and two new 30GB models. Each is compact, exceptionally lightweight and includes easy-to-use editing and DVD burning software. The two 20GB models, GZ-MG21 and GZ-MG27, and the GZ-MG37 30GB model feature a 1/6-inch 680,000-pixel CCD, 32X optical zoom, Auto Illumi Light and can capture 640 x 480 stills. Thanks to new processing, these models also offer improved low light performance and reduced noise levels. The 30GB GZ-MG77 offers a 1/3.9-inch 2.2-megapixel CCD, F1.2 lens, 10X optical zoom, auto flash and 1632 x 1224 stills. It also offers JVC’s Low Light Plus, which combines the F1.2 lens with JVC’s 3D Noise Reduction (3D NR) that reduces video noise by approximately 30 percent and minimizes edge flicker. The top three models – GZ-MG27, GZ-MG37 and GZ-MG77 – include a 2.7-inch widescreen LCD. All four new Everio G Series camcorders include a 16:9 video mode and 16:9 widescreen mode, PictBridge compatibility for direct printing, SD card slot, USB mass storage compatibility, Data Battery that displays recording time remaining, remote control and Power-Linked Operation, which powers up the camcorder and engages the standby mode simply by opening the LCD. Operation has also been enhanced with a new four-way controller mounted on the outside edge of the LCD. Pressing the four “compass†points on the circular control operates menu settings, manual controls and playback control.
The top three models – GZ-MG27, GZ-MG37 and GZ-MG77 – offer built-in DVD burner control allowing them to be directly connected to an optional JVC DVD burner, the CU-VD10 SHARE STATION. The camcorders connect to the burner via a USB cable and the burner is easily controlled by the camcorder. Everio .mod files are converted to the DVD Video format and the SHARE STATION creates discs that can be played on most DVD players.
When transferring Everio footage to a computer, transfer speed has been significantly improved for 2006, taking approximately half as long to transfer data as the original Everio G Series models. One hour of Ultra model video, about 4GB, now takes about five minutes to transfer.
For use with PCs, Everio camcorders come with CyberLink’s PowerDirector Express NE for editing, PowerProducer 3 NE for authoring and PowerDVD 5 NE for playback. For Macintosh users, JVC provides Pixela’s Capty MPEG Edit EX for simple editing and file conversion to popular editing formats, and “mono DVD†for easy DVD authoring. An available option is Capty DVD for full function DVD authoring.
JVC Everio GZ-MG21 features:
* 20GB hard drive
* CCD: 1/6†680k
* 32x optical zoom
* Max. Digital Still: 640×480
* 2.5″ Clear LC Monitor
JVC Everio GZ-MG21 Reviews
Unbeatable has an editor’s review of the JVC Everio GZ-MG21 and writes, “Unfortunately, when we came to review the performance of the JVC Everio GZ-MG1 we were disappointed in nearly every aspect. The image stabilization that is on-board didn’t work too well at all and showed up every bump and shake that we made, even very slight ones, so filming looked shoddy and wobbly. Poor video quality was to follow and was quite honestly, diabolical. Every few seconds there are vivid movement lines and they ruin every scene, with the colour being poor too, we could not believe our eyes. The video light was not very effective, so indoor filming was washed out and dark, whereas filming outdoors was a bit better with colour reproduction being ok. The MG21 has the ability to store your movies onto its hard drive disk space and onto a Secure Digital card, which we found did work well and we managed to get around 5 hours of footage on it when filming in the Fine (DVD) mode, which was very impressive, especially as there were no cassette changes in between. The battery life was below average and only lasted about 1 hour 30 minutes before flaking out, which was rather poor too, however we would recommend upgrading to a larger battery.” Link.
