When you find a camcorder that retails for just south of eight hundred bucks, you’re expecting it to do a whole lot, right? At least, I sure would be–for eight hundred bucks I expect it to make me toast in the morning and refer to me as “Your Magnificence”.

The JVC GZHD300, meanwhile, will do neither of those.  In fact, it might as well be holding a big hand-lettered sign on the shelves it’s on reading: “Will be disappointing for money.”

Sure, it comes with plenty of features, including a sixty-gig hard disk for up to twenty five  hours of full HD recording, a 20x optical zoom with Konica Minolta HD lens, face detection system, laser-touch operation with sub-trigger and zoom; and one-touch upload to YouTube.

And this is great, no mistake!  But when I can pick up a model RIGHT NEXT to this one on the display wall and get a better zoom than I can with this one, somehow shelling out a whopping eight hundred bucks for same somehow seems like a bad idea.

Thus, the JVC GZHD300 isn’t really a bad camcorder, but there are plenty of better options out there in a camera, and of course by better, I also mean cheaper.  But I mean better too, and that’s the worst part of the whole mess.