JVC GZ-X900

Audio Features (1.25)

The GZ-X900 has a built-in stereo microphone, but it doesn't have any external mic inputs or headphone jacks. This puts it quite a bit behind the high end camcorders from other manufacturers, which often include a range of audio features. The only feature included on the GZ-X900 is a wind cut option for reducing the wind-noise rustle picked up by the microphone.

The placement of the built-in mic is odd.

The built-in mic is awkwardly positioned on the GZ-X900, although we've seen this placement before on the Sanyo VPC-HD2000. The mic is located on the top-back of the LCD panel. This is a rather strange placement for the built-in mic because the position of the microphone becomes entirely dependent on the position of the LCD panel. If you have the panel tilted back, this means the mic is pointing slightly downward. When you rotate the LCD 180° to film yourself, the microphone points straight down to the ground. If you tuck the LCD inward for compact filming, the mic begins to press-up against the inside of the LCD cavity.

Below is a table listing the audio features of the GZ-X900 and its comparison camcorders:

Other Features (1.7)

High-speed shooting (slow motion modes)
The JVC GZ-X900 offers three high-speed shooting modes called H1, H2, and H3. With the first mode, H1, the camcorder shoots 120 frames per second (fps), which is twice the speed of normal 50i video. Since the speed is twice as fast, this means the recorded footage will be stretched out to double the length when you play it back. So, when the camcorder records 4 seconds of footage at 100fps, it plays back as 8 seconds of slow motion video. The other two high-speed modes offer 250fps, which is 5x the speed of normal video, and 500fps which is 10x faster than normal.

Of course, the GZ-X900 doesn't capture HD video when these slow motion modes are used and the video quality with these modes is abysmal. Additionally, each speed mode has a standardized clip duration that cannot be adjusted (the 100fps and 250fps go for 4 seconds, the 500fps only records for 2.4 seconds). This, along with the fact that most manual controls (other than focus, AGC, and grid lines) cannot be used in conjunction with the slow motion modes, make these recording modes quite limited.

 
Image Effects
The GZ-X900 has a few image effects that you can play around with to alter the appearance of your video: Sepia, Monotone (black and white), Classic Film, and Strobe. Classic film slows down the camcorder's shutter speed to 1/15 of a second or so to produce a jittery, choppy look (without overexposing the video). Strobe is even slower and choppier., and it mimics the effect of a strobe light by using an extremely slow shutter.

The Register Event feature

Register Event
Before recording, videos can be marked with various event tags on the camcorder. This helps organize the videos and group clips that belong to the same event. The camcorder has 10 different tags—Vacation, Holiday, Sports, Anniversary, Congratulations, Baby, Son, Daughter, Birthday, and Graduation—and each has 3 versions. This way, you can have three separate vacations registered as Vacation1, Vacation2, and Vacation3. Register Event is a decent feature for organizing your video, but we doubt most people will be fastidious enough to use them routinely.