Canon's New Killer HD Camcorder

CamcorderInfo.com has a review of Canon's new Vixia HF10 Camcorder.



It's a zexy camera that I really want to love. It's a third generation flash-based AVCHD camera with a higher bitrate (17Mbps!) Tape seems archaic these days, but it's still a hard format to beat. The hard core users are still using tape (better quality, easier to get into your edit suite, etc.), but with media prices falling, it's hard to resist a flash or hard-drive based device.

The first of two things that give me pause about this camera is the AVCHD format, which is a great format... if you don't want to make edits. Unless you've got the latest Mac Pro, you're probably going to be waiting for AVCHD to convert to an intermediate, editable format. You'll also need to contend with the 4:1 disk space requirements. That is to say, if you've recorded a 16GB AVCHD file, you'll need 64GB to edit it. My second concern with this device (but also with most flash-based HD camcorders) is that it doesn't have optical viewfinder - an underrated feature. If you shoot lots of footage, you'll find that you prefer a viewfinder over the LCD screen.

If you are looking for a flash based camcorder, this Vixia is hard to beat. Outside of the performance of the camera alone, however, caveat emptor.

Tags: camcorders, avchd, canon, hd