JVC's handycam-shaped 707 comes with a good LCD and handles changes in light well – particularly when shooting from shade into sunlight. The general image quality is good, although the camera suffers the JVC plague of poor zoom. It's fine to about 5x but falls away from there. It offers a selection of three resolutions for still photos with the highest being 1,280 x 960.

Selecting a winner from the 11 cameras in the lab was not an easy task. While there was a $1300 variation between the cheapest and the dearest, the difference in quality and features was not as obvious. For example the Samsung D701i, which was the cheapest of the cameras, had more features than some of the cameras that were several hundred dollars dearer. The only problem was a question of reliability because the first unit to arrive at the Labs was inoperable.

Although it takes great footage directly to a hard drive, it's being held back by a few problems.

At first glance the JVC GR-D230 looks very much like one of the DVD-R/RW cameras. But it's the stylish design and disc like LCD screen that leads you astray and it is in fact another of the Mini DV tape cameras with the cassette cleverly concealed.

The JVC cameras all rely solely on digital zoom – and as long as we didn't use the zoom, the 520 performed well enough. However, as soon as you want anything more than 2x or 3x magnification, the quality deteriorates quite rapidly. It uses a 0.8-megapixel CCD and records stills to the memory card. While the specs are similar to Canon's MV530i, the performance was not.

dv camera

Despite having a 1.02-megapixel CCD, the 820 still suffered similar poor optical zoom performance of its little brother, with image pixelation at high zoom. The image stabilisation was only average and that put you off seeking any sort of magnification while filming moving objects. The improved CCD does provide better stills, and the 820 can use MPEG-4 to compress video clips.

Good things often come in small packages and that's the case with Sony's PC108E. It is only fractionally larger than the JVC GR-DX77 (the smallest camera in the lab) but weighs in 65 grams lighter. Sony has kept it compact by providing a separate docking station that contains the USB, DV and S-Video ports. There also are AV and additional microphone connectors on the camera itself.

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Like the others in Canon’s MV500 series, the MV530i is about twice the size of Canon’s MVX2i mini cam, but is still comfortable to hold and use.

Great real-time performance, particularly with high definition footage. But the EDIUS Pro software still needs a few more features to usurp the competition.

There is barely an area of consumer electronics that Sony does not have a hand in, and its contributions are seldom substandard in quality.