Digital Trends

The GZ-MS100 strips the hard drive out of JVC's higher end G-Series camcorders, and adds features that cater you YouTubers.

It’s no secret that YouTube played a major role in popularizing the ultra-cheap Flip camcorder, which was practically tailor-made for jamming videos to the site, but for those with more serious YouTube ambitions, the Flip falls a little short. JVC hopes to cater to this crowd with its new Everio S-series camcorder, the GZ-MS100, which combines a fuller camcorder feature set alongside specialized YouTube functions.

Although styled close to the Everio G-series HDD camcorders, the MS100 uses SD cards for recording to keep costs down – meaning you’ll have to buy your own. It does, however, retain many G-Series features, including a 2-7-inch flip-out LCD, a Konica Minolta lens with 35x optical zoom, and Laser Touch buttons that users merely glide a finger along to operate.

To facilitate easy YouTubing, the camera includes a special feature that will limit recording length to 10 minutes (YouTube’s limit), to prevent having to manually trim down footage manually. After shooting and connecting the camcorder to a PC, pressing its “upload” button automatically launches an application for uploading to YouTube, taking the potentially confusing transfer process out of the equation for the amateur users.

The JVC Everio S Series GZ-MS100 will debut in June for $349.99, a full $100 cheaper than JVC's lowest G-Series camcorders.