Moving to 4K
Just recently, I had the chance to buy a new camera, a JVC HM170. I’m not sure what prompted me to browse eBay that day, previously I’d browse eBay almost daily but for many months I’d not bothered.
I’ve always been a JVC fan, I’ve previously used a JVC HM700 HD camera with a JVC HM100, before that I had a JVC HD100, I still have a JVC BR-HD50 edit machine for my old DV and DVCAM tapes to playback into Final Cut Pro / Blackmagic Resolve. The JVC HM170 is 4K, I’d been looking for a smaller camera but with higher quality output and the HM170 looked to be a good choice.
I’ve always been a JVC fan, I’ve previously used a JVC HM700 HD camera with a JVC HM100, before that I had a JVC HD100, I still have a JVC BR-HD50 edit machine for my old DV and DVCAM tapes to playback into Final Cut Pro / Blackmagic Resolve. The JVC HM170 is 4K, I’d been looking for a smaller camera but with higher quality output and the HM170 looked to be a good choice.
Looking on eBay, an average price for a good HM170 is around £1000 to £1200, they were around £1500 new. The listing was not in a category I thought it should be so I guessed it didn’t have a large amount of watchers, the current starting price was £250, so instead of ‘watching’ it (and showing interest!) I made a note of the finish time.
On the day, with the finish time approaching, the price was still only £250, I made a bid of £700 but didn’t place it until 8 seconds to go on the auction, I won the camera for £530. It still amazes me how many people don’t actually know how to bid on eBay or how it works - more on that later.
The camera arrived as promised, included in the sale was a very nice E-Image camera bag (£72), a spare handle unit with microphone (£150 new) and an extra lens hood. Checking the camera, I found virtually all the camera settings wrong and results would have looked very poor, I contacted the seller to say it had arrived safely and mentioned the settings, she said she’d sold it as it was too complicated to use!
I had a shoot that week and decided to use the HM170 as I’d set it up correctly and tested it. For the shoot I used an additional JVC camera - the HM100, the shoot went well and I was able to match the footage in the latest version of DaVinci Resolve 18 (match clip) and produce stunning results.
Come forward about 8 weeks and browsing eBay (again, I don’t know why on that particular day!) I spotted a JVC HM200, this is the same as the HM170 but with network and live streaming capability. The starting price was £250 so I decided to watch it but not register an interest.
At the auction time the price had crept up in £10’s to £420, I put a bid of £700 on, again with 8 seconds to go and won the auction for a price of £430, as mentioned earlier if people actually put in the top price they were prepared to pay instead of bidding in £10 increments I probably wouldn’t have won the auction.
I now have 2 identical 4K cameras, I copied the settings from the HM170 to an SD card and put that into the HM200 and loaded the settings. I’ve just finished a shoot using both the new cameras and in the edit, the footage was virtually identical switching between the angles.
I’m sorry to retire the HM700, when I bought it, I thought it would be the last camera I’d buy, it looked 'professional' when you turned up at an event rather than these small black boxes you see now (and which I've just bought into!) and I loved using it however my age (!) and 4k have crept up on me and to keep pace I needed to look at changing, here’s hoping this time, they will be the last cameras I buy.
To see the quality of the footage from both the new cameras - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNZwxrUzzUM
