JVC Everio GZ-MG330 HD Camcorder Review

Good aspects: Relatively good price; compact design; large 30GB storage for holding hours of video.

Bad aspects: No mic input, headphone jack or eye-level viewfinder; frequent video compression artifacts.

Product Review: The near identical models of the JVC Everio GZ-MG300 series (the MG330, MG335, MG360 and MG365) are budget-priced, hard-drive-based camcorders that are nice enough, but produce typical low-budget video. They’re all nearly identical in terms of performance, features and video quality.

Watch the JVC Everio GZ-MG330 HD Camcorder on YouTube

The MG330 has 30GB storage and comes in blue, silver, or red; the 60GB MG360 comes in black. Each of these two models has an additional model denoted by a model number ending in “5.” Which include a Share Station dock. The MG335 comes in white or silver, while the MG365 only comes in black. The dock provides FireWire ports and S-Video. The MG330 was tested for this review.

To begin with, the entire MG300 series are very compact camcorders, they measure only 2.7 inches tall by 4.5 inches wide by 2.2 inches deep, and weigh about 12.7 ounces with battery. That’s small enough to be of little burden, even after holding it for several hours. Unlike the joystick, touch screen or jog dial controls used by other manufacturers, JVC has a distinctive Laser Touch control bar, a smart blue light LED vertical touch-sensitive strip at the left of the 2.7 inch widescreen LCD monitor, which lets you rapidly skim through all the menu selections. The actual selections are made with five small, recessed buttons situated at the bottom of the LCD making it a surprisingly functional arrangement. Frequently needed items sit at the top level of the menus, including video quality, gain control (for low-light shooting), scene exposure modes, aspect ratio (16:9 or 4:3) and backlight compensation. One level deeper into the manual settings menu reveals manual focus, shutter speed, exposure compensation, white balance, and metering options.

The MG330 records MPEG-2 video in four quality modes with varying bit rates: Economy (352×240 at 1.5Mbps), Fine (5.5Mbps) and Ultra Fine (8.5Mbps). With the 30GB hard drive, the camcorder’s recording times range from about 7 hours in Ultra Fine mode to just over 37 hours in Economy; that doubles for the 60GB models. Video and stills can also be recorded to a Micro SD card. JVC includes a composite video/stereo RCA cable for TV playback and you can also simply copy the files to your PC or Mac.

The MG330 does not come with an eye-level viewfinder which is pretty common for models this size. Having a backup viewfinder is always a preferred option. Other omissions include a headphone jack, to hear what’s playing back from the unit, and a microphone jack for connecting an external microphone to improve the quality of recorded audio in noisy environments.

While the 35x zoom definitely provides a great range, it is tricky to maintain a regular, smooth zoom. The digital image stabilization generally isn’t up to the needs of the high zooms on these models and is much less effective than optical stabilization. However, the autofocus feature works fairly well in good light, and can even focus quite well as close as 1 inch from an object.

All things considered, the JVC GZ-MG330, MG335, MG360 and MG365 are still useful and practical camcorders for entry-level users who want to have a compact HD model for capturing everyday video without having to worry about running out of memory. They’re also less expensive than their counterparts from Sony (SR65 and DCR-SR45) and Panasonic (H60 and SDR-H40).