Great news for JVC in Europe as the BBC orders over 500 cameras from the Japanese company. It's probably fair to say that this was a surprise for everyone, including JVC, as it was assumed by most people that Sony would get this order
We can only speculate about the BBC's reasons for choosing the JVC device, the GY-HM650, but its small size, compliance with the EBU quality requirements for long-term programming, multiple codec choices and FTP transfer capabilities probablly played a part in the choice.
We saw John Kelly, General Manager of JVC for Europe, Ireland, Scandinavia and MEA at the BVE last week where he and the entire staff of JVC were clearly very excited about this significant order for them.
He said afterwards:
We are delighted by the success of the GY-HM650 camcorder. Following on from the recent announcement that the GY-HM600 series camcorders meet EBU requirements for journalism, this provides further confirmation of its suitability for broadcast news production.”
JVC's GY-HM600 series cameras (GY-HM600 and GY-HM650) meet the EBU’s recommendations for journalism use (“Tier 2J”). The cameras also meet the requirements for general long form HD programming (“Tier 2L”), when used with a suitable external recording device supporting 50MB/s or greater recording.
The EBU test report for the GY-HM600E and GY-HM650E can be viewed at http://tech.ebu.ch/camtest/CamTestReports04