I have just purchased a JVC Everio GZ MG175 and compared to my old Panasonic mini DV camcorder the picture quality is quite bad. I'm not quite sure yet if I have a faulty model and should return it.

Anyone got any ideas?

Well naturally the HDD camcorders may look worse because unlike miniDV which stores RAW data on your computer, the HDD camcorders figure out a way to compress that data which in return you will see a loss in quality, sometimes it's significant, other times you can hardly tell. I suggest returning it and fetching up a miniDV because no matter how good a standard definition HDD camcorder will look, it will never match up to uncompressed footage.

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Thanks for your advice, Ret80.

That's what I'm coming to think of. The quality looks ok on the camcorder screen but once transferred to the PC the quality suffers immensly and the picture gets blurry.