Advice needed

[SanJoJoe]

Hello all. I am new to the forums, and was hoping you would be able to give me some advice. I will be installing an entirely new system into my car in early september, and one of the things I will be replacing is my headunit. I decided to go with a Navigation unit, and am looking at getting either the AVIC-Z3 or the JVC KW-NX7000. I was also considering the F90-BT, but after reading about all of the issues users have been having with the new F series, I have narrowed it down to the above two units. One of the things that originally attracted me to the Z3 was the built in hard drive. However, I have read that you can only rip original audio CD's to that hard drive, and most of my music has been purchased from iTunes, so that feature would not be very useful to me. Has anyone had the opportunity to test the JVC unit? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

[GnatGoSplat]

Cost being equal, I probably would have bought the NX7000. I bought a Z2 and upgraded it to a Z3 because I got a good deal on eBay, less than half what a new NX7000 would cost from Crotchfield or other major retailers.

 

The NX7000 despite having only 4GB of storage, apparently has the same number of POIs as the Z3, 12-million. Maps are from Navteq which are a lot more accurate than Tele-Atlas. The screenshots I've seen indicate its UI looks almost as pretty as Pioneer's. It reads MP3s and even iTunes AAC files from SD, USB, and even DVD. It can also play DiVX on any of those. It has no hard drive to eventually fail. It has RDS. It even has a removable face, very rare on a double-DIN multimedia head unit. It has a 7-band EQ.

 

It appears that there is nothing the Z3 has that the NX7000 lacks. However, the NX7000 has a ton of features the Z3 lacks.

 

I have owned JVC products in the not-too-distant past (KD-AVX2) and the build quality is on par with Pioneer. I haven't seen any local place with an NX7000 to play with, but on paper, it looks like it kills the Z-series in features.

 

Looks like with the MS Live Search 20% discount, you could get a brand new KD-NX7000 as low as $687 on eBay which is not bad at all, in fact, that's just a tiny bit more than I paid for my used Z2.

[dagreat1]

wow. i wish i knew that a month ago

[GnatGoSplat]

Yeah, my Z2 is still sitting on my room floor and I've got an ND-BT1 and CD-IB100II on their way to me right now, but I'm still tempted to pick up an NX7000 just to compare.

 

What I would really like to see, is a PDF of the owner's manual. One thing I really want is a QWERTY onscreen keyboard for entering POIs like the Z-series has. The screenshot I saw of the NX7000 showed an ABC keyboard which is a source of frustration for me on my D2 that I'm currently using because I just can't get used to it. It's up there on my list of reasons that I decided to pick up my Z2. Before I even consider switching to NX7000 instead, it HAS to have a QWERTY keyboard.