JVC GZ-HM340

Compression (6.50)

The JVC GZ-HM340 uses the AVC/H.264 codec to compress video and the camcorder is AVCHD compliant. That means it has the same compression system used by most HD camcorders from Sony, Canon, and Panasonic.

The GZ-HM340 has four quality options for recording HD video, but the camcorder has no standard definition recording setting. The top quality option—UXP—records at a maximum bitrate of 24Mbps, which is the highest bitrate possible with AVCHD recording. Read more about the advantages and disadvantages of various high definition compression types.

Media (7.61)

The GZ-HM340 has two options for recording media: 16GB of internal flash memory and an SD/SDHC memory card slot. The 16GB of internal flash memory isn’t a lot—there are many models out there with upwards of 64GB of internal flash memory—but it is still a good feature to have.

With the memory card slot as a backup, you can also take advantage of JVC’s ‘seamless recording,’ which will automatically continue recording on the memory card once you’ve filled up the internal memory. The table below lists the approximate record times for the GZ-HM340: Read more about the advantages and disadvantages of various media types.

Still Features (7.61)

Let’s be clear, the GZ-HM340 is not a good camcorder for taking still photos. Its sensor is very small, which means it doesn’t have a very high pixel count for still images (its effective pixel count in still image mode is between 0.56 and 1.09 megapixels depending on what aspect ratio you shoot with). You are guaranteed to get better still images from even a cheap digital camera. Still, if you’re in a pinch you can capture photos with the GZ-HM340 and the camcorder even has a dedicated still image mode.

You can take photos in three sizes with the HM340: 1920 × 1080, 1440 × 1080, or 640 × 480. The thing is, only the 640 × 480 setting is a native resolution—the other two are interpolated because they use more pixels than the camcorder has available. The camcorder has no built-in flash, but you can capture still images during recording. See the table below for the full list of still image features.

The GZ-HM340 did well in our still color testing: the camcorder measured a color error of 4.00 and produced a saturation level of 108.5%. These numbers are similar to what the camcorder earned in our bright light video testing, which means there shouldn’t be much of a difference in color between photos and videos captured by the GZ-HM340.

All four of the camcorders shown below only capture still photos with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The HM340 has much deeper colors than the Samsung HMX-H106, but it also captured a slightly darker image than the rest of the models.

The 0.75% noise we measured on the GZ-HM340’s still images isn’t the best score, but it’s not awful. We would have liked to see a noise level that was more akin to what the camcorder earned in our bright light video testing (around 0.58% noise). Still, the HM340’s still noise performance was roughly on par with the JVC GZ-HM200 and Samsung HMX-H106.

The GZ-HM340 doesn’t capture high-resolution still images, so it should come as no surprise that the camcorder flunked our still sharpness test. At best, the HM340 measured a horizontal sharpness of 718 lw/ph with 23.6% oversharpening and a vertical sharpness of only 458 lw/ph with 24.1% undersharpening. These numbers are simply no good—even for a mid-range HD camcorder—and they are significantly lower than what we measured on last year’s JVC GZ-HM200. Still, we can’t really fault the GZ-HM340 for doing poorly on this test. The camcorder really doesn’t have the photo specs to succeed as a still image camera.