Labs

The VL-Z100 is a camera of two halves. The left portion houses the lens, LCD screen, viewfinder and battery, while the right contains the tape mechanism and main controls. The curved design ensures that the VL-Z100 is a snug fit in the hand.

Controls are minimal, with record/pause, zoom, photo and standby being the only dedicated buttons. There's a good range of other manual settings, but you'll need to grapple with on-screen menus to access them. The viewfinder

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is black and white, but the 2.5in LCD bursts with colour and brightness. Sadly, the FireWire port doesn't support DV-in for running edited video back to tape.

Sound quality was the best of all the cameras here, capturing speech and music clearly with hardly any audible motor noise. Image quality was more of a mixed bag. The highlight was the sharpness of the video we captured, even at extreme zoom settings - although its 10x optical zoom is the lowest here. We suspect this extra sharpness is added digitally, as the effect was similar to a sharpness filter you might find in video and photo-editing software - effective, but slightly unnatural looking. Colours were captured well in brightly lit conditions, but without a lamp to assist it, the night mode produces blurry and jerky footage.

We were baffled by the VL-Z100's digital image stabiliser. In wide-angle shots it was bizarrely smooth, but at extreme zoom settings it was far less effective.

The VL-Z100 is a decent bargain, but JVC's cheaper GR-D23 offers more for even less.