JVC Everio GZ-MG20 20 GB Hard Disk Drive Camcorder w/25x Optical Zoom

I bought this camera before going on a recent cruise with the intention of documenting my trip through video. This is a great camcorder for making home videos. I took video during some of the shows that I went to on the cruise and the audio quality was fantastic. Playing it back at home on my home theatre system, it sounded like I was there at the show. The fact that it records directly onto a hard drive is a big plus and it makes viewing and editing very easy. You can easily review clips on the camcorder LCD itself, as a menu pops up that you can scroll through and play whatever clip you want. It also means you can easily just delete clips that you don't care to keep. For editing, you basically hook up the included USB cord to your computer, and your computer automatically recognizes the camera as an external hard drive. No additional software required for this! You then just copy or move the files onto your hard drive. Note that the files are stored as .MOD files. The only software I have found that recognizes .MOD extensions is the included Cyberlink software, however, all you have to do is change the file extension to .MPG and every other video editing and playback software will recognize it. The included Cyberlink software is very limited. I ended up downloading a free trial of their PowerDirector software to edit my video. I found this software suite to be an easy and powerful interface for editing my footage and I managed to make a great souvenir video of my trip, with background music, DVD titles, scene transitions etc. I plan to buy the software suite when my free trial is up.

The battery life is advertised to be only an hour. This may seem short, but for making home videos, shooting an hour of footage in one go is quite a lot. I never ran out of battery on the cruise, but then whenever I wasn't shooting, I had my camera plugged in and the battery re-charging in my cabin.

My only complaint with this camera is the image stabilization. Its fine up to about 12X zoom, but once you get past this, the images become very shaky and virtually unusable. You would need a tripod to get zoom past 12X. This is annoying considering that this camcorder is advertised as a 25X optical zoom. Its basically useless past 12X.

All is all I definitely would recommend this camcorder for its ease of use and the fact that you no longer have to worry about tape.

Just got this camera recently. I'd read a number of reviews suggesting the image quality wasn't too hot, but thought I'd give it a try as I'm really tired of trying to keep track of all the little tapes I've accumulated over the years. Out of the box, I shot some video of the family in the house using only overhead lighting. Then I converted it to DVD (included software is very easy to use, but I wanted to use Nero. The file extensions are .mod, but Nero recognized it just fine). Yep. It was grainy and the color was lackluster. THEN I read the manual. As it turns out, the camera comes from the factory with the GAIN setting turned on. This really boosts the signal in low light conditions, but can result in a slightly grainy image. So I turned it off. That helped alot. Then, realizing that none of the walls in my house are white, I manually set the white balance (very easy to do with this camera) and WOW. Big difference. Colors are just right. I even filmed my daughter in her pink room and it came out right. I'm liking this camera more and more everyday. Just be sure to read the manual and don't be afraid to tweak the settings to your situation.

So far, only two downsides: the VF707U battery it comes with is a wimp (about 50min record time) and the camera doesn't have a standard view-finder. However, this last point is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the camera is so small, it is a pleasure to carry it just about everywhere.

I recommend this camera if you don't mind a little learning curve, plan on buying another battery, and are tired of trying to keep track of little pieces of recording media. For me, It's making taking video fun again.

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Ok, I bought this for a Christmas present for my wife and she loves it. The first thing you notice is how small it is... I mean it's tiny!

When I first heard about these I checked for reviews on them and the two sites I found reviews on both had mediocre scores. Much of the fuss on thse sites had to do with the video quality of the still images.

I think many felt mislead b/c in the description it says you can select from image sizes of 1152x864. 1024x768, and 640x480. What we've found out is that even though you can select the 1152x864, 1024x768, and 640x480 the digital stills are only 640x480 because the two higher sizes make the images look bad but the 640x480 size looks super.

Honestly, I didn't buy it for it's digital camera capabilities (we love our Fugi e510) although it's super convenient to have this available albeit only at 640x480 b/c you can switch back and forth between stills and video very easily.

I can't comment on the Mac capabilities other than it seems a little harsh to give the unit 2 stars b/c "you" didn't read the packaging correctly.

I really don't know what all the fuss is about where the video quality is concerned. We haven't owned a camcorder since our last vsh-c which we were happy with as well. The videos at the highest setting looks great with very rich and true colors. The camera is eXtremely easy to setup and use from the time you take it out of the box until your first transfer over the very fast USB 2.0 connection.

Another great feature of this very small camera is the internal SD Card slot and the camera's ability to record both stills and video to this excellent removable media. It's very fast, super cheap (compared to others like memory stick and xD cards), and they already come in capacities up to 4gb.

I thought the SD Card would be soley for stills but was hoping the HDD would be removable, so this was a very nice surprise b/c like most PCs now-a-days our computers have the internal memory card readers so you can just pull the SD Card and pop it in your PC for editing, emails, burn to dvd, etc.

As far as dislikes go the only issue I had, which is really nitpicking, is that the buttons on the LCD are a bit small for my liking. I'm a pretty big guy though so this may not even be an issue for many of you.

I'm totally happy with this purchase!

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A good camcorder but quality of video image not quite as good as DV tape, even in good light. Low light capabilities also not as good,, even with gain up the lenses in the better Everio units with the 15x zoom may be better in this regard. Yes, the files are ".MOD" extensions but just need to be changed to "MPG" and should then play in any media player with the MPEG-2 codec installed (if you computer can play DVD movies now, you should already have this codec installed). I play my videos on Windows Media Player. I didn't even install the supplied JVC software WIN XP recognized the camera and it functions just like a flash drive from there. Very easy. Once you files are changed to ".MPG" extension they should be editable in most, if not all, video programs. I have no problems with Adobe Premiere STD, which is generally considered the industry standard. Battery life is only 1 hour strongly recommend getting the 2 hours battery as an accessory. A very handy little camera that make it so much easier to work with your videos no more capturing from DV tape required. And the 4 hour storage beats hauling around extra tapes and wondering what may be on them, can I record over, etc.... Ignore comments about lack of Firewire/IEEE1394, this is irrelevant. I transfer all my video on a Sony laptop using USB2, even though Sony favors Firewire. Bottom line, a very handy little camcorder if you're willing to sacrifice a bit of video quality for much better convenience.

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I bought this camera and I just love it. Forget about the issues some people mention here about low quality video, the trick is to change the camera settings for the environment you are recoding in. Just leaving it to the default settings do create grainy video in some situations, but change the settings and you will get gorgeous video quality. There is nothing wrong with the camera, it is all about the operator.

I love the internal harddrive. I did not want any disc or tape based systems, and this is perfect. Particularly convenient is it that this camera support SD cards, as my Casio digital camera uses that too --so I have a stack of them already that I now can use in both cameras.

The only thin missing is a nice case/bag for the camera. That and an extra battery or two is on top of my shopping list now.

I'll shoot my bride in my upcoming wedding, with this camera that is.... :-)