The JY-HD10U reminds me of my Volkswagen Beetle — small, agile, great mileage, everyone comments on how adorable it is, and I feel happy when I’m behind the wheel. I might not take it on a really long road trip, but it’s great for every day.
I come from the world of high-end corporate production. I am used to broadcast quality, usually provided by a sizable crew, cases of equipment and not a small amount of accompanying anxiety. While this does not replace that scenario in its entirety, it nonetheless demonstrates a near future when it will. I can shoot the footage, conduct the interviews and pick up some pretty creative B-roll. It inspires me because of its user-friendliness. I’ve been able to use it as an extension of my body in a way that I have been able to do with still cameras but not with video cameras.
Because the image is HD, it looks and feels like film, but it’s less threatening to people I’m interviewing. I love the zoom lens. Also, skin tones are warm and accurate— flattering, even— and when I shot action, as in a table tennis match, I felt the camera move easily with me, which is a great asset for shooting sports.
The drawbacks are the ones you might expect in a new product. The camera controls could be better designed and placed, the manual focus is too sensitive and the battery easily falls off the camera. These are issues that will likely be addressed in the second round of development but the price makes them infinitely more tolerable. To suit truly professional applications I would hope for some improvement— while still maintaining that VW Beetle feel.
— Nancy Davis, filmmaker
From the Editor
I must emphasize the quality of the glass in front of this camera. The zoom is really exceptional for a camera of that cost and size. If you compare a $100,000 HD camera to this $3000 camera, it’s quite astounding what you get for $3000. As a B-roll camera, or a POV camera for reality-type programming, it’s quite appropriate. The biggest issue at this point is that it doesn’t shoot 24p.
There are design flaws. You can, easily and without even knowing it, switch to automatic mode, which will make your footage inconsistent. But I shot an entire day completely in automatic mode and was very impressed. Skin tones had an absolutely beautiful quality.
It has a difficult time dealing with flat red colors, overly saturating stop signs and red taillights, and there were significant moiré issues. But we didn’t look at the footage on a waveform monitor and vectorscope— we stuck with practical applications, and for a large number of uses this is a very practical camera. Shooting down on the New York City subway I drew very little attention because the camera looks like a high-end consumer camcorder! The police didn’t care what I was shooting; they just didn’t want anyone setting up tripods.
I did have a problem with how difficult it was to focus. Even a few-degree turn of the focus ring would go through huge ranges of focus. Focusing on the single-eye viewfinder was actually better than using the fold-out screen, and an added benefit of that is your battery life is greatly extended, because that fold-out screen sucks power like crazy. Still, the auto-focus worked like a champ— albeit a little slowly— the color balance was great, and the image stabilization helped a bit without degrading the picture.
— Alton Christensen, Edgeworx
From the Vendor
In addition to the positive reviews we’ve received from numerous customers about the JVC JY-HD10U camera, we’re pleased that Nancy and Alton had similar results. Nancy recognizes that it doesn’t behave like a typical camcorder, and it shouldn’t. It’s the world’s first handheld HD camcorder, and therefore certain aspects will be different. HDTV is a different television format— one that offers unique benefits with far higher resolution than standard television.
Both Nancy and Alton found it more difficult to manually focus. This is not surprising. This will be a difficulty with all high-definition cameras, regardless of price or format. LCD viewfinders and monitors simply don’t have enough resolution to accurately focus the camera. We recommend using auto-focus or an external monitor. A professional HD monitor will also allow the DP to correctly evaluate the color accuracy of any given shot.
Alton brings up 24p. In HD mode, the JY-HD10U produces 30 progressive frames per second. While this is not exactly 24p, it gives viewers a visual feeling very similar to the motion of film.
Alton also makes a good point about the unobtrusive nature of this camera. With its compact form factor, you can walk inconspicuously in most places and get footage where you couldn’t when using a large camera on a tripod. Our users are constantly reporting getting very creative shots this way. One producer actually used a passing nuclear submarine as a backdrop for a music video!
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