A generally harsh review of the JVC GY-HD101 ProHD MiniDV camera

This is a 2006-vintage 3CCD industrial camera, aimed at the low budget professional videographer.  It's a step above from consumer equipment, and I'd tend to call this a prosumer, rather than professional camera.

It has a proper manual lens, but it's 1/3″, which apart from being the bottom end of lenses, makes it very hard to get wide-angle views, or shoot in close-quarters, without having to use a fish-eye lens, because the image sensor is so small.  I've had troubles with trying to get two-shots, even in large rooms.  You end up backing right up into a wall.

Having a proper lens does let you add lens remotes, so you can comfortably do tripod filming standing behind the camera.  At the very least, you do want a remote zoom and record start/stop mounted on the tripod arm, so you don't have to wrap yourself awkwardly around a camera.  It's not just a comfort thing, it makes a tangible difference to how well you can pan, tilt, zoom, focus, and adjust iris, simultaneously.  It also means that the record start/stop control is always under your fingers, so you can start and stop, exactly when you need to, to do basic in-camera editing.  Remote focus can be handy, too, but the viewfinder is really inadequate, and there is no iris remote, so you'd have to be shifting your hand about an awful lot (the time delay of doing so will ruin many a shot), or rely on auto iris (which is remarkable good at nearly always going for the wrong exposure, on any camera).

It is shoulder-mountable, with a comfort pad underneath.  But the camera sits so far forward that it's front-heavy.  That gets very tiring, quickly.  Not only do you have to push the weight of the camera upwards, constantly, you've got the weight of your both your arms to hold up, too.  I've read one or two other reviews where they've said it's balanced; I don't know what imaginary world they live in, but a camera with a balanced weight doesn't tilt up or down, under its own weight, when you sit it on your shoulder.  This camera is not balanced, it falls forward, significantly, under its own weight.  Even with a large battery attached to the back, it's still front heavy.

The eyepiece viewfinder is too far back that you have to position your head awkwardly backwards, and it has no height repositioning.  In essence, it only suits the head size of a child.  And you can't flip the lens up to view the, incredibly tiny, screen from a distance while you shoot from the hip.  The side-panel viewfinder is useless in this mode of shooting, too, since it's too far back.  Also, when the side-panel screen is on, it inserts a loud whine into the audio circuitry, even with the audio level controls turned completely off.  And dare I mention that both viewfinders are low-resolution colour LCD screens, you need to play with an irritating focus assist feature (coloured highlighting of sharp details).  Try filming something like a football match, with a low-resolution viewfinder, and you soon find that the ball becomes invisible, thanks to it being less than one viewfinder pixel in size, and you lose track of what you're supposed to be filming.  Oh, and there's annoying writing over the viewfinder picture, despite there being black space above and below the 16:9 area of the viewfinder screen, where it could have been put, instead.  Sure, you could turn off all the information, but some of it is useful to always having showing, but not in the way of the picture.

It has XLR audio inputs, for line or microphone inputs, with switchable +48 volts microphone phantom power, but only has 3.5 mm jacks for audio outputs—a stereo jack for stereo line out, and a stereo jack for mixed-mono headphone monitoring (you can't actually monitor stereo/two-track audio as separate channels).  Naturally, this bad choice of audio line out connector, also, comes with a non-standard signal level, so good luck with just simply connecting equipment together to do a dub, you'll need to go through a mixer to get an appropriate signal level.

There are composite or component video outputs, but they're RCA connectors, and its a hard choice of only being able to use one signal or the other, because they come through the same connectors.

There is no genlock input.  So you cannot do properly synchronised multicamera work.  There's no way to synchronise this camera to a system, but you could sync other gear to this camera (which is the worst way to do genlocking, and you're screwed if your other gear has no genlock input, too).  Those who think that there's no need to genlock have never had to deal with sound-sync problems, getting synchronous pictures between multiple sources, synchronous timecode between cameras, and several frames of picture delay because of digital vision equipment having to delay the signal to resynchronise it.

Likewise, there's no timecode input, other than through the firewire connector.

There's no standard 4-pin XLR for DC power, just a socket for one of those tiny unreliable nipple plugs.

There's a large 6-pin firewire connector for DV in or out, but it's far from robust.  Firewire is supposed to be hot-pluggable, but it's recommended that you do all your connections with all the equipment turned off, so you don't accidentally fry it, when connecting ungrounded equipment together, or by badly fitting firewire cables that cross-connect the power supply terminal to another terminal.  This camera has had its firewire port fried, twice, and its an expensive repair.  You're also supposed to have the power switched off, on both equipment being connected together, if you change the DV or HDV mode switch next to the firewire port, else that may damage it, too.  When it switches modes, it disconnects the four data lines from one I/O chip and connects them to a different one (different encoding techniques are used for each mode, it's not just a change in the number of pixels).  Perhaps it's not good at breaking before making connections.

It has full manual control, as needed for professional work, and for once, the iris stays where you left it when the camera is switched on and off (as long as you're in manual iris mode).  There's partial manual controls, for those moments when you're trying to do ten things at once while you're filming, and want to put one or more things on automatic (iris, video AGC, audio AGC, continually self-adjusting white balance).  And a full automatic control mode, to switch all the automatic systems on at once, for all those people who really shouldn't be using a professional camera to film with.

There's a number of annoyances and stupidities with the manual controls, though.  For example, you flick the gain switch up to turn the gain down, and vice versa.  That's just stupid, and counterintuitive.  Thankfully, you can completely re-assign the gains applied to each of the three positions of the gain switch, to turn it the right way around.  But, unfortunately, you have to wade through menus to get anything other than three particular gain settings.  e.g. It could be 0, +9 and +18 dB, or any other settings between 0 and +18 dB of gain in 3 dB steps, or AGC (which turns on auto-iris, as well).  But only three of them can be assigned to the switch.  Gain isn't just for coping with inadequate lighting, it's also a control that lets me use a different iris opening to play with my depth of field.  Give me a rotary gain control with 3 dB click-stops, and make it a reliable fast control to use, not one of those rotary encoders that you have to slowly fiddle with, else it jumps several steps in one go, like the menu wheel may do (and they're horrible prone to doing that, as they get older).

There's three user-definable buttons, which can each be assigned one of a few different options to control (colour bars and tone, auto-exposure adjustments, and black stretch/compress options), but then you have to remember what you set them to, and your camera won't be the same as anybody else's, unless you go around labouriously customising each camera in a multi-camera shoot.  I spent around an hour putting sensible settings into this camera, and had to refer to the manual to work out what some of the obtuse menu items meant, and how to adjust them.  I wouldn't want to have to do that in a hurry, like unconfiguring dumb settings after someone else has fiddled blindly with a camera.  And, no, hitting the reset all option isn't your best choice, you'd have to unconfigure stupid default choices.  Luckily settings can be stored on a SD card, but you better have your own one kept separately, because sure as eggs someone will overwrite your settings with their own.  Usefully, the white balance settings seem to be stored with the menu settings, so you could recall special tinting presets, presuming that the camera is stable enough to operate the same way more than once.

There are some switches hidden behind the side-panel screen, mostly the sort of controls that you won't use much, but the camera/VTR mode switch might need using quite a lot, if you want to check tapes as you go along.  And the audio auto/manual gain switches would be better near the manual gain controls, or on them, rather than hidden somewhere else.

On that note, it's nice to have a bar and tone generator in the camera, and I consider them both essential for professional work.  But why isn't the tone at a preset level?  The audio gain controls adjust the tone, the same as they adjust microphone or external audio levels.  There's no way for you to accurately set tone to a reference level (and that's its purpose), the audio level meters are just too crude and chunky to be used, that way.

There's a small variety of recording modes and frame rates that you can pick from, but most of them you cannot really use (more on that in a moment).

Out of those, DV-50I is the same as traditional PAL standard definition television.  You can put that on tapes, DVDs, and watch it on any PAL television set.

It may be possible to output DV-25P spread across both fields of an normal interlaced picture, but that will depend on your player being able to interlace 25 frames/second progressive video into 50 fields/second.

All of the 720 line options require something else as your playback medium.  Either you'll have to play back directly from the MiniDV tape into a suitable television set, copy it to some other medium (not tape or DVD), or downconvert it to standard definition, thereby losing any advantage of shooting in a higher definition format, in the first place.  And on that note, these aren't really high definition formats.  720 lines is only marginally better than 576 lines, and progressive scan modes are not an increase in definition.  720 line video is only of use with those few medium-definition broadcast television channels that exist, or if you're going to view it through a computer.

24p and 25p modes look horrible jerky, and nothing like the “movie film look” that some people want to get out of video.  Film could look jerky, too, at those frame rates, but cinematographers nearly always set the shutter angle so that motion-blur smooths the strobiness of the picture out, and this camera can't do that.  It's not just a case of changing the frame rate, you also have to change (lengthen) the exposure time, to suit.

50i and 50p modes don't look jerky, because there are twice as many images per second being taken and shown, and the camera's exposure time is suitable for those field and frame rates.

Although the camera claims to be high-definition, it's really not.  Firstly, 720p is medium resolution, at best, and an uncommon resolution as far as being able to give your customer something to play and watch—tapes or DVDs are only capable of handling standard definition, and Blueray is really aimed at the same 1080 lines of resolution as most high-definition television sets, though it does support 720p.  Secondly, according to the service manual, the image target is not scanned with either 576 or 720 pixels down its height, for either of the resolutions that it films at, so say hello to interpolation errors, and goodbye to actually getting the resolution that you wanted to use.

The sensor is 1292 by 810 pixels, but only 1280 by 802 of them are used.  In HD mode, it uses 1280 by 660 pixels, and does vertical scaling to fake-up a 1280 by 720 pixel image.  And in PAL SD mode, it uses 960 by 660 pixels, and scales in both directions to fake-up a 720 by 576 pixel image.  Or, for NTSC SD mode, scales in both directions, to fake-up a 720 by 480 pixel image.  The service manual doesn't say how it manages the pixels for standard definition 4:3 versus 16:9, but it's most likely going to be another fractional scaling method.

You have to ask why it does that (scaling rather than 1:1 image pixels in and out), as scaling to fake a resolution that doesn't really exist causes aliasing errors, which can be quite noticeable, especially seeing as there's not a lot of resolution to begin with.  It must be that the sensor doesn't have the right number of pixels in the appropriate proportions to directly scan the pixels in a 1:1 manner.  So why make the sensor that way?  Were they expecting you to use anamorphic lenses?

There's no black-balance adjustment, and while it'd be nice that a camera might work so well it doesn't need to be re-black-balanced, this camera has a distinct tint to its blacks, and there's nothing I can do about it.

The image sensors are divided in half, with the left and right halves of the picture being handled by separate devices.  Under certain conditions (and not particularly unusual conditions), you can see the dividing line because either side of it the picture may have obviously different characteristics (black level, video gain, and/or tint).  This is a particularly odd thing, that I've never seen in any other camera.  The service manual says this is down to how high-definition video would, otherwise, have too much data for a single component to be able to handle.  Apparently, later models were better at hiding the division, but it was clearly visible on the camera that I was playing with.

Much of the camera is plastic, and in some very bad places.  Most of the bracket that the front viewfinder swivels around is plastic, and part of it has cracked so it feels that it might completely break if you're not careful while looking in the viewfinder, or carrying the camera (if it just leans against something, never mind if falls sideways onto it).  The teeth that hold the battery in place are plastic, and have been damaged while the camera is handled.

I'm coming down hard on this camera, because it's so awkward and ill-conceived, and there's no good reason for it to be so.  The design could have been so much better, and there's decades of experience around so that manufacturers ought to be able to produce better products.  It's this sort of thing that leads many of us to believe that manufacturers deliberately make these middle-budget cameras badly, hoping that you'll buy one of their much more expensive cameras, instead.

The picture quality is quite good, when in a 50 Hertz scan rate mode, but it's let down by the above annoyances, and when you are going to be using a camera for several years, these things really piss you off.  And it's let down by the MiniDV format.  Tiny tapes are not robust, they don't have a long enough running time for when you have to be able to do uninterrupted filming of long events, and the tape mechanisms are woefully fragile.  Not to mention that it uses one of those automatic head cleaning rollers that rubs against the heads each time you load and unload a tape.  While they originally seemed a good idea, at some point in the equipment's life they, nearly always, get dirtied, themselves.  Then, they automatically dirty the heads every time they come into contact with them, and nothing short of disassembling the mechanism fixes that problem.  Also, I commonly find that VTRs with auto head cleaning rollers, have a band of worn-off metal just above the had gap, due to how the roller rubs against it, and this camcorder is no exception.

It's very hard to get in and replace the cleaning roller, it's certainly beyond the average user.  And thanks to them getting dirtied really quickly, and how they unnecessarily repetitively grind away at the heads, I prefer to remove them than replace them.  Unfortunately, hand cleaning the video heads is next to impossible, thanks to the tiny heads being buried in the chassis.  Even when you pull the camera apart, they're still very hard to clean.  You really do want a disposable head cleaning cassette, and only use it sparingly (like when you notice a head problem, rather than ritualistically using them).  So long as you don't keep re-using tapes, particularly putting old and crappy tapes into a camera, or load and unload tapes in dirty environments, head clogs should really be a rarity.

Also, miniaturised cameras bring about their own set of problems, and this camera is no different.  They don't have enough mass to have adequate inertia to smooth out wobbles when being hand-held, or on the shoulder.  Even pressing the record button on the lens grip is enough to bump your shot around, though chiefly because the rubber over the button is too hard to press.  It's particularly made worse by not being well balanced to sit on your shoulder (it's front heavy), nor having a useful viewfinder that you can see into while you film with a camera balanced on your hip.  Telephoto shots tend to look like you were filming while sitting in a dingy riding the waves at the beach.  So you put it on a tripod, then you discover that the camera is not heavy enough to weight the tripod down against moderately strong winds, nor against doing pan and tilts with overly-stiff fluid heads (and they nearly always are way too stiff to move, especially Miller tripod heads).

I have to wonder just who they made this camera for?  Professional MiniDV is more or less aimed at the low-budget producer, who's probably filming weddings, sports matches, seminars, theatre, and corporate stuff.  It's not really good enough for broadcast purposes.  While corporate work usually suits short tapes, the other likely uses do not.  Not to mention that it's a nuisance having to go out with a collection of tapes on a job, instead of having one tape in the camera all day, and one spare that stays in your bag of bits.  You have tapes that run out at awkward spots, making it impossible to do jobs that require continuous prolonged shooting.  In over twenty years of doing that sort of work, I had stuck with using S-VHS, as it was the only thing that would let me record for at least 90 minutes without interruptions, and it was all-too-common that you may need to shoot for over 2 hours without any breaks.  If you're recording in a theatre, single camera, 90 minutes is commonly the length that you needed to be able to shoot, without interruptions, at the very least.  Likewise for wedding receptions.  While other parts of a wedding day were probably short enough to use a 60 minute tape, the reception length is unpredictable, and you could easily have to film a plethora of speeches, cake cutting, and the bridal waltz, one straight after another, with no time to do a tape change, but 60 minutes often isn't a long enough tape time to fit it all on.  Likewise with sports, various matches go for around 60 to 90 minutes, then there may be overtime, and presentations.  And while you should have enough time at half-time to change a tape, you probably will not at any other moment, the pauses between them could be mere seconds.  Considering the size of this camera, and the types of work that professionals do, it would have been better if they'd made the camera to use the medium or large size of DV tapes, giving you a longer running time.