JVC Kenwood GY-HM200 4K Camcorder: Eyes-On

Launched just days ago, the JVC Kenwood GY-HM200 4K Camcorder makes an appearance at Inter Bee 2014, a huge broadcast trade show in Tokyo. If you missed the initial launch information, this camcorder is designed to be relatively “affordable” (I say relatively because it’s still $3000 or so). I haven’t been able to test the video quality under controlled conditions, but the demonstration on-site was pretty convincing.

Among its features, the JVC GY-HM200 can stream and record to local storage simultaneously. This is extremely handy if you want to stream and keep a clean recording at the same time. If you have tried to do this before, it can be very tricky if you want a high quality image because you need to use multiple devices, or it can be simple, but the image quality may suffer.

While solutions do exist, this camcorder aims at making the whole process easier, because the WiFi or LTE connectivity is supported by the camera directly. Codecs for Ustream, Wowza Streaming Engine, and ProHD Broadcaster are supported, and protocols to support more sites and content-delivery networks (CDNs) are supported as well.

The camcorder has a 12X optical zoom lens and a 1 / 2.3” backside illuminated (BSI) image sensor. It can record 4K Ultra HD and 1080p (at 50Mbps), and uses the SD Card format for permanent storage. While this is not “cheap”, building a setup with this kind of image quality and ease of use is not really obvious either. What would you do with it?

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Photo-Video
Tags: Inter Bee, Inter Bee 2014, jvc, kenwood