Somehow I suddenly feel better about the frequent typos or errors I make. [Kottke via Greg's Opinion]

What's the difference between unauthorized and illegal? Well, when the RIAA says ripped copies of CDs are unauthorized, they're pretty much saying they don't like it but can't stop you from doing it. When they say it's illegal, they're taking your ass to court and trying to ruin your life because you shared a Coldplay CD on Kazaa back in 2002. This isn't to say that the RIAA has improved its standing in our eyes — no, we still think it's the douchiest group of douches around — but even they know that no one will accept that ripping a CD in itself is illegal. [TechDirt]

iPhone Rival Coming... [pmptoday]
Negri Electronics

Three words for you, Kim. Made. In. Korea.

At least the LCD panel. However, if you really want unparalleled technology for its $13,250 price tag, you can get yourself a better Samsung Full HD TV, a good AV receiver and some good speakers. And if you want something with good quality to look great on your bachelor pad then burn that credit card in the BeoVision 7. And eat less danish pastry. – Jesus Diaz

Bang & Olufsen Introduces BeoVision 7 - Its Premier LCD Screen to Arrive in North America [PR Newswire]

UPDATED: My error, Kim is a man. My fault for letting my sculptural-scandinavian-goddesses obsession make me assume that he was a she instead of checking that fact.

Holding the camcorder is a delight. It feels like the designers of this device have carefully considered the user, because this little camcorder fits perfectly in the hand. Nice usability touches such as powering the camcorder on when you open its 16x9 widescreen display, a little focus assist button up front right where you need it, and our favorite, an easy-to-use focus ring, add a lot to this overall user-friendly package.

Navigating the menus is easy, too, where you can either control them with little buttons beside the viewscreen, or use buttons located on the camera body. A slight distraction is the red pilot light on the camcorder itself, making you think at first that you're recording. But there's a red REC indicator on the viewscreen that shows you when you're actually recording onto the unit's 60GB hard drive.

And yeah, there's the big plus with this camcorder: There's no tape involved. All your footage is recorded on that 60GB hard disk. The hard drive can store nearly five hours of footage at its highest- quality setting, gathering video with three CCDs and laying it down at a full 1920x1080i. It uses electronic pixel shifting to spread out the pixels, but the result is ultra-high quality. No, it's not up to the standard of professional-level 3-CCD camcorders such as the Panasonic HVX200, which uses similar raster-stretching techniques, but then you can buy three of these JVC HD Everios for the price of one of those.

Looking at its picture in a 720p monitor, we realized that yes, this is the real thing: tack-sharp HDTV with a camera small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Never have we seen such great video coming out of a camera so small and so cheap. It doesn't feel cheap, though, and we were also highly impressed with its f/1.8 - 1.9 Fujinon zoom lens, 10x optical glass that's plenty fast and crispy-critter sharp.

There is image stabilization on board, too, but we didn't get as much benefit from that as we have in Sony and Canon camcorders in the past. Since we like to use a tripod as often as possible anyway, that's not a huge factor for us, especially when the lens zoomed all the way out. But still, trying to zoom all the way into its full 10x length made for some really shaky looking shots. We agree with David Pogue that this Everio's image stabilization leaves much to be desired.

Upon close examination, the camcorder's image quality does contain compression artifacts, but they weren't glaringly obvious to the uninitiated. The picture doesn't look as buttery smooth as uncompressed HD, nor is it quite as good as HDV video. Even so, we found the colors to be vibrant and true without being overbearing, and the overall impression is that this is definitely HD we're dealing with, and its sharpness is impressive. It's not quite up to professional standards, but for amateur work, it's good enough to be considered overkill. The most significant flaw we could see was its low-light performance, which looked a bit too grainy for our taste. We had hoped for better in that department, especially with three CCDs.

What about editing this footage? It outputs regular MPEG-2 in a wrapper called .tod that can be edited far and wide using the included Cyberlink software, iMovie and most HDV editing apps. but you'll need to use conversion software to make that happen. In addition to that mpeg format, its star format is the new AVCHD, a flavor of MPEG-4 that uses the vaunted H.264 codec. As a stopgap, JVC offers its VD40 burner it calls a "Sharestation" that can let you offload HD footage onto a garden-variety DVD, and then play back those videos directly to a TV without using a computer at all, an innovative approach. But the problem there is, those discs won't play back in a DVD player—you must use the Sharestation. We'd rather just see a capture/edit/output workflow like we've become accustomed to with DV.

For the DV-like workflow, the camcorder lets you record in a format called "1440 Constant Bit Rate" mode, and then output that video using the FireWire interface. The resulting video is an HDV compatible format, and can be easily edited by many editing software applications. That adds a lot of versatility.

Summing up, this is a great camera for your $1700 (and it can already be found for less than $1500 and falling), far surpassing any cameras that were available in the past for this price. However, we haven't tested its competitors, but one thing's for sure, the quality of these HD camcorders, recording on hard disks without tape, is astounding. The JVC Everio GZ-HD7 gets a qualified cheer from us here, and we can't wait to see what its competitors can do. – Charlie White

Update: The JVC Everio GZ-HD7 camcorder doesn't use the AVCHD format as originally written. The article has been corrected to reflect that fact. We regret the error. - CW