JVC Everio GZ-MS100 Camcorder

With a grand daughter now at the house 3-4 times a week, the request was for a camcorder to take videos with.

We have had a video camera before, it was a Sharp model 10 or so years ago, but it never worked all the great and the tapes were a royal pain to deal with.

I spent a lot of time looking at these from the very low end up to about $1k before moving back down to this unit.  I didn’t think we would use it all the much and spending a lot of $$ on something we may not use a lot didn’t make much sense.

One thing I really liked about this particualar unit was that it recorded on to regular SD cards.  While not an “HD” unit, I didn’t need HD quality to start with and with the setting I have it on now, I can get almost 4 hours of video on an 8gb card (something I seem to have a lot of floating around lately).

The battery it came with will last about 2 hours which really is more than enough.  Can’t see spending 2 hours video taping anything very often.  Normally, most of the video clips are 2-4 minutes at a time which can then be stitched into a longer video with all the segments put together for the “event”.

I can always get another battery, either larger or the same size if that becomes an issue.

Unlike a camera where the images are a fairly managable size, the videos are much larger.  A 4 min video of the grand daughter removing fur from the kitty was cute, but before I did anything with it it was 185mb in size.

Using Super (a free video conversion software package), I was able to convert this larger file into much a much smaller flash file (smaller screen size too).  Which I could then post on the family site for everyone to see.

I also have been playing with the demo version of Sony’s Vegas 9 Pro suite which can do all kinds of effects, stitch various snippets together and then output very professional looking stuff.

I plan on using the camcorder for video taping Weather events too…. right now it is in San Diego getting a family tour.

Oh… one very strange thing about the JVC camcorder… It comes in 2 colors, the silver one you see and a really cool looking red version.  I was going to get the Red version until I saw the price difference… I really don’t get it since it is exactly the same unit with just a different color, but on Amazon the silver one was $179 and the red one was $499 .. go figure???  We got the silver one.

Looks like we got a real deal because the silver one is now $269 on the same site though I don’t recall it being advertised as a special.