Labs

Who needs fancy extras and trendy designs when you can get high-quality moving pictures, crystal-clear sounds and a comfortable set of controls, all for a spectacularly low price?

Taste is a personal thing, but we wonder how the company that designed the cute and curvy MVX250i also created the bulbous MV700i. Is it deliberately cheap-looking? However, here at Computer Buyer, we're firmly believe that function is far more important than form, and if your camcorder's sober looks mean your kids are less likely to run off with it, then all the better.

The MV700i has no lamp or card slots, but it does have an accessory shoe, albeit an unpowered one. This would be more useful if there was a microphone input, but it could still be used to hold a battery-powered lamp. These aren't particularly cheap, though - if filming in very dark conditions is important you'd be better off with the JVC GR-D23 (page 60) or Canon MVX250i (page 58).

Of all the cameras on test, this one is the most comfortable to hold. The relatively slim, tall design sits well in the base of the palm with record/pause and zoom controls falling perfectly under the thumb and forefinger. The menu wheel is well-positioned too, and other buttons turn it into a focus or exposure compensation control. Sadly, the latter is simply an exposure shift rather than an exposure lock as offered by

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the MVX250i - it's still handy, but not a lot of use for creative shots. A few controls are hidden behind the LCD screen, but tape transport controls remain easily accessible running above the LCD. The screen itself isn't particularly bright, and the colour viewfinder is positively gloomy, but neither proved to be a problem in practice, and the ability to tilt the viewfinder is welcome.

None of the cameras on test fared badly in our outdoor tests, but the MV700i's footage wasn't quite as vibrant as that from the pricier Canon and JVC cameras. Still, colours never looked unnatural, and the camera coped well with shifts in exposure as we moved from shady to sunny subjects.

All the cameras were able to focus down to a couple of centimetres from the lens, but the MV700i was particularly impressive, focussing on subjects that were touching the metal ring just millimetres from the lens, capturing more detail than we could see with the naked eye. The 18x zoom is the joint best here, and thanks to Canon's superb digital image stabilisation, extreme zoom settings were surprisingly usable without resorting to a tripod.

Indoors, colour accuracy was beaten only by the MV700i's pricier sibling, with natural skin tones in both natural and artificial light. As the ambient light decreased, colours became rather gloomy and dull, but it was only in extremely dark conditions that detail was lost.

Switching to Night Mode improved the exposure, but as usual, the reduced frame rate made the picture jerky and blurry. Sound quality was clear and full-bodied, with remarkably little motor noise caught on tape.

Image quality isn't much better than the cheaper JVC GR-D23 (page 60), and it's slightly worse in low light conditions. However, the Canon holds the edge in both outdoor and indoor normal lighting shots. With superior image stabilisation, handling and manual controls, we think the MV700i's well worth the money. Solid performance