JVC GR-DF550

This review By Terry Sullivan
In June 2006 JVC has unleashed a new camcorder with a great looking and features. It swarm of inventive consumer-electronics products, from tiny ear-clip headphones with built-in MP3 players to 3-CCD hard drive camcorders. Unfortunately, that spirit of innovation doesn't seem to have filtered down into the JVC GR-DF550 miniDV camcorder. The GR-DF550 gives you clear images, smooth footage, and very good audio, but nothing really sets it apart from the pack.

This becomes apparent from the moment you pick up the camcorder and take note of its ho-hum design. Boxy, black, and gray, the GR-DF550 weighs a little over a pound with battery, miniDV cassette, memory card, and lens cap. Perhaps it's the plastic feel or the hodge-podge design, or maybe we're becoming accustomed to stylized consumer electronics, but the camcorder didn't make us feel like we were holding anything exceptional. When you're actually working with it and shooting video footage, the articulating 2.5-inch LCD panel works fine. But we didn't like the grainy and choppy electronic viewfinder (EVF), though the diopter-adjustment controls are handy for people with glasses or less-than-perfect eyesight.

Video capabilities and settings are divided into Auto mode and Manual mode, which lets you set features through the menu. The structure of the menu is functional and fairly easy to navigate, although we'd like to see brief descriptions of various features on the LCD when scrolling through the menus. The camcorder has some interesting capabilities, but with such limited documentation and on-screen help, it wasn't always easy to figure out how they work.

We were disappointed to see that shooting in Auto mode prevents you from accessing the menu, so if you want to shoot in low-light situations and use the camera's Night Alive mode, you'll need to switch to Manual. Be prepared for some weird, David Lynch–like effects in Night Alive mode. To compensate for the low light, the camera captures scenes in a spooky way such that images contain light trails in choppy slow motion. It can be used in conjunction with an LED light for additional, though limited, illumination. If you want supersharp, clear images in very low light, this might not be the feature for you. But if you're hoping to shoot the next Mulholland Drive, Night Alive will be your favorite mode.

At 15X optical zoom, the GR-DF550 provided adequate zoom range for a camera in its class, but we weren't crazy about the power zoom lever, which sits atop the cassette portion on the side where you hold the camcorder. We felt the pulling and pushing of this lever didn't provide the most accurate method of zooming.

When shooting video footage, for instance, you can press a snapshot/slow button (different from the record button), which lets you take a photo and "freeze" an image during video recording while the audio continues to record. This can be set for various effects as well, including taking a negative image. Our problem was not with the feature itself, which, while on the cheesy side, had some value. What we didn't like was the fact that we had to do a bit of playing around with the camera to figure out exactly how the snapshot/slow button works, and, again, the menu and instruction booklet weren't much help.

In our talking-head clip, we discovered very good dynamic range, average sharpness and clarity, and very good color realism, although skin tones were a bit cool and lackluster. Overall, the scene could be brighter. One other problem was that in low lighting, the footage was fuzzy and lacked detail. For our action clip, we saw that the camcorder contained a very good autofocus system, though we did notice some artifacts. In some situations, the scene was too contrasty and heavy. Overall, using the GretagMacbeth color chart, we found vibrant colors and good color matching. On our EIA Resolution Chart, the GR-DF550 captured a solid 400 lines of resolution, and we found very little hiss in the audio, with no swishing, dropouts, or popping. The video on our TV monitor looked good, with no problems or aberrations, and we especially liked how the text on the signs looked. The camcorder booted up in a reasonable 3.2 seconds.

As with most camcorders, the still-image shooting leaves much to be desired. The image resolution was in the 1- to 2-megapixel range, so the GR-DF550 definitely won't be replacing a regular digital camera. We saw lots of noise in the images, and there's no flash for low-light shooting.

Overall, the GR-DF550 is a safe and reasonable choice for a midrange digital camcorder, especially if you have a taste for oddball video effects. For roughly the same price, though, we like the Canon Optura 30 just a bit better for its superior look and feel and its sharper still images.

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