11 out of 11 people found this review helpful.
Nice HD Camera but not perfect,
Date of Review: Apr 18, 2009
The Bottom Line: This is not perfect and needs improvement, specially on battery but it is perfect one if you consider price vs features and video quality.
If you are looking for a good HD camera at budget price - this is it. I wish that Canon had included external batter charger and had given date imprinting option on videos/photos but you can live with these short comings. Remember you may have to spend extra on (though you can live without these)-
- Additional 16 GB card (~$35/-)
- External battery charger (~$60)
- Additional battery (~$80)
Positives:
- HD Camera: It is good to have HD Camera as things are moving towards HD side.Even though HD/Blue ray DVDs are not very popular yet but in future HD videos may be very common. So it is more future-proof.
- Good quality video when you have good light.
- 16 GB internal memory and great size.
- Looks great in black model.
- Optical image stablization is very handy
- 3 MP still shots.
- You can take shots even during video capture. This is great feature.
- No external lens cap.
- 12 X zoom.
- Light-weight and seemingly good-quality casing.
- No messy tapes
- No hard disk or tapes , so less number of moving parts. I would presume that hard disk will fail easily (not sure if I heard hard disk failures in cameras). Size is smaller as there is no hard disk.
Negatives:
- When I play video (m2ts files) created by camera on media player, many horizontal lines show up in lower half of video. I changed the camera, also tried with different modes like 60i and 24p but same issue. These lines go away when you convert m2ts to mpg files.
- Not so great low light performance
- Battery is only for 1 - 1.5 hours.
- While downloading photos/video external power must be connected (Camera doesn't rely on its week battery!)
- Battery has to be charged inside camera as no external charger available.
- No option to display date on video . My older Canon camcorders always had this option. Not sure why Canon droped it in camcorders as well as in camera. Personally I find it very useful to have date/time on videos or photos.
- HD is not of much use unless you have blue ray player.
- You need to convert m2ts files to mpg for normal DVDs. This process takes long time. At ballpark it may be around 1.5 hours for 1 hour of video. You need to buy software for that. I guess , processing time will depend on your software and computer power.
- Included software is very basic. You need to buy another software. I am still looking for one.
- No face detection feature - considering the price of camera , I would expect this.
