New 4K camcorders from JVC

Posted on November 13, 2014February 11, 2015 by David Johns

JVC has announced a slew of new 4K-capable handheld camcorders under the moniker “4KCam”.

The cams do look intriguing; the base model, labelled GY-HM170, has a single 1/2.3″ CMOS chip with 12.7 megapixels and loads of control buttons on the body.

It saves 30p (/25p) 4K (or 60p/50p HD or SD) footage at 150Mbps (yes, you read that right) as H.264 onto dual SDXC cards (for backup or continuous recording). UHS-1 Class 3 cards are required, for obvious reasons. File format is .mov for 4K and .mov or .mts for HD

There’s a 12x optical zoom lens with two levels of ND filter; that lens is f1.2 at best, ramping down to f3.5. Zoom range runs from 29.5 to 354mm (35mm equivalent). There are nine user-assignable buttons. We do like a user-assignable button here at Tubeshooter.

It’s quoted as recording the aforementioned 4K as well as 4:2:2 HD at 50Mbps, and has a 24x electronic zoom when in HD (ie it’s using all those spare pixels on the sensor to give you an HD crop) which JVC claim is lossless.

The camcorder spits out a live 4K video signal over HDMI for external recording or monitoring; and it has a built-in stereo mic and a 3.5mm unbalanced mic input. There’s no XLR audio though – for that you need to step up to the next model, the GY-HM200.

Speaking of which, the GY200 looks very similar but has an XLR audio handle on top. . This model has the added bonus of being able to stream live via protocols including RTMP, to hardware decoders, Ustream, Wowza Streaming Engine and Zixi servers.

There’s also a super-sized super-sensor version called the GY-LS300CHE which looks similar but uses interchangeable lenses, being built with a Super 35mm sensor on a micro-four-thirds lens mount.