JVC announces their brand new High Definition camcorder, the Everio GZ-HD6. The GZ-HD6 is a 3CCD hard drive based camera priced at just over a $1,000. If you been reading some of my previous posts then you already know that I recently purchased a high def camcorder, the Canon HV20. At the time the HV20 was the best deal on the market. Much to my irritation, that my have just changed.
The JVC Everio GZ-HD6 has a number of features that jump out immediately over the Canon HV20. First, the HD6 has three separate chips called charge-coupled devices (CCDs) as opposed to the single chip CCD design of the HV20. The CCDs are the chips that the camcorder uses to process images and color. In most cases more CCDs mean better images and brighter colors can be captured by the camera. With a 3CCD camcorder, the camera is able to more effectively process images by assigning a single chip to handle each of the three RGB (red, blue, and green) colors. In a one CCD design, the single chip must process all three colors which normally results in picture quality inferior to that of a three CCD camera. As you can expect, the 3CCD cameras are usually far more expensive
Even Canon’s new HV30, a slightly improved version of the HV20, still utilizes a single chip design. I guess that JVC has decided to take advantage of this oversight by Canon by producing solid three chip design for their new HD camcorder. I have to point out that this isn’t JVC’s first foray into the $1,000 consumer level 3CCD camera market. The earlier JVC High Def hard drive based cameras had a weird compression format called AVCHD that made editing the footage extremely difficult for most people. In many cases the footage had to be converted before some of the popular editing software could recognize the footage. Which defeated the whole easy of use issue in purchasing a hard drive based camera in the first place.