State Of The Art: Your Life, In A Movie Of Top Quality

Wow is typical. Jeez is another favorite. Man, look at that is a runner-up.

The Everio GZ-HD7 from JVC, priced at $1,700, holds five hours of recording time and has separate sensors for green, red and blue.

These are the noises your friends and neighbors will make the first time they see high-definition movies — of your life.

And no wonder. The picture and sound are many times sharper and clearer than standard TV. The picture is wide, like a movie. And heres the kicker: This isnt some high-def nature channel playing in a demo loop at Best Buy. These are home movies. Your children, your family outings, your vacations.

Most high-def camcorders record on plain old MiniDV tapes, the one-hour cassettes sold by drugstores everywhere for about $4 each. But next month, Sony and JVC will offer high-def camcorders that record on built-in hard drives instead.

The beauty of hard-drive camcorders like these — the Sony Handycam HDR-SR7 and the JVC Everio GZ-HD7 — is that you never have to rewind or fast forward; you can use an on-screen table of thumbnail images to jump to any scene for immediate playback. You never have to worry about recording over something by accident. And you never have to wonder if theres a blank tape inside.

Both of these new machines are clad in shiny, futuristic black cases. Each can store five hours of high-def recordings at top quality — which is a very, very high quality indeed. The picture is so sharp, it could slice a tomato.

Both cameras connect to a high-def TV set using either HDMI, which is a single cable that carries both picture and sound, or component cables, which have three for picture and two for sound. Both include goodies that are usually missing on cheaper camcorders, like a microphone jack and, on the Sony, a headphone jack. Both have built-in lens covers — a great feature — and a minutes remaining battery display.

And both come with batteries that dont even come close to matching the hard-drive capacity. Sonys lasts for 2 hours; JVCs goes for 90 minutes or so. Both accept optional five-hour batteries.

These are also expensive machines. The suggested list prices are $1,300 for the Sony and $1,700 for the JVC, although if you pay list price for your electronics, I should offer you some shares in my Brooklyn Bridge Fractional Ownership Program. Once these camcorders finally hit store shelves, their street prices will probably be a couple hundred dollars lower.

On paper, the JVC sounds delicious. Its a three-chip camera, meaning that it contains separate sensors for red, green and blue light. In principle, this setup should offer much better color than one-chip cameras like the Sony. Surely that feature alone justifies the $400 price premium and the much bulkier design.

Unfortunately, the three chips dont seem to have much effect. I ran both camcorders through parallel video torture tests, filming everything from sunny softball games to spooky unlit basements and bike rides on overcast days. In no case could any of my guinea-pig observers detect a difference in color or clarity.

There were two noticeable differences in other areas, though. First, in low light, the JVC displays much less graininess than the Sony — but also much less detail. You get an evenly toned, very dark image; the Sony offers a very grainy image that appears to be much better lit.

Second, the JVCs image stabilizer is nowhere near as good as the one on the Sony (or on Canons terrific new HV20, a high-def tape camcorder that I tested for comparison).

This is a serious problem. Because of the wide screen, high-def video emphasizes the horizontal elements of the picture. If the camcorder isnt well stabilized, its very easy to make your audience seasick — an unfortunate feature for anything but cruise videos. Even with both elbows pressed against my rib cage, I just could not get completely stable video from this machine.

That broke my heart, because the JVC is such an amazing camera in so many ways. Its bulkiness affords the designers the luxury of making buttons big, clear and intelligently positioned. The manual controls are a delight, especially the big, rubberized manual focus ring.

The JVC also has a much wider-angle lens than the Sony. To fit a 6-foot person into the Sonys field of view, you have to back up 15 feet, which is too far away for the microphone. You have to back up only nine feet using the JVC.

Now, the trouble with hard drives is that they get full. You cant exactly pop into a Wal-Mart and pick up a blank hard drive. You have to empty the hard drives contents onto a computer or a DVD burner.

The Sony SR7 stores video in a new compression format, unhelpfully called AVCHD, that was developed especially for tapeless camcorders. This storage format requires less space than, say, the HDV format used by high-def tape camcorders. The Sony SR7s lower-capacity sibling, the SR5, also uses this format. So does the compact CX7, which records onto memory cards instead of hard drives.

Unfortunately, few popular video-editing programs (Premiere, Pinnacle, iMovie, Final Cut and so on) recognize AVCHD.

Sony provides a basic AVCHD Windows-only editing program, and says that coming versions of Nero, Ulead, Pinnacle, Sonic Solutions and Sony Vegas will have AVCHD compatibility. Thats lucky, because editing your videos right on the camcorder is like trying to paint your living room through a keyhole.

JVC, on the other hand, can impersonate a tape camcorder, so you can play its recordings right into iMovie, Pinnacle or any other Mac or Windows editing software.

E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com

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