bonnie & jason

Canon HV10: initial thoughts

By jason, October 21, 2006 on 12:09 am | In commentary, photography, tv | No Comments

I haven’t had a chance to put the camera through it’s paces yet, but here are my first impressions:

Handling

The camera is small!  The vertical format isn’t a problem for me as it has been for some reviews have stated, but my hands aren’t all that big.  For point and shoot stuff, it works just fine.  I will say that some of the buttons are kinda small so you won’t want to make adjustments while shooting.  The zoom function works ok… although in my opinion it’s a little too “on-off.”  You move it a little and nothing happens and then wham-o, it zooms too quickly.  It’ll get better after I get some practice, but I still think they could have done a better job with the calibration.  The only other comment I have is that I found it easier to put my middle three fingers in the hand strap instead of my last four fingers.  This way, I don’t have to hold my arm at such a vertical angle.  The only caveat to this would be if I was using the electronic viewfinder instead of the fold out screen, which I don’t see happening all the much.  To tell you the truth, the EVF is so small and hard to use, I’m not even sure why they bother including it.

Picture Quality

In a word, “fantastic!”  Resolution is great and the low-light performance that camcorderinfo.com bashed isn’t as bad as I was expecting it to be.  The zoom lens has pretty good range and the digital zoom up to 40x is actually quite usable.  (I probably wouldn’t go with the 100X range though.)  The best part about the camera, however, is probably the optical image stabilization.  When zoomed out, the image is rock steady.  When zoomed in (even at 40X digital zoom) you don’t have the headache inducing jitters that accompany non-stabilized images.  Aside from the actual stabilization, however, is the quality of the image itself.  Unlike electronic image stabilizers, optical systems don’t have to go through any processing mumbo-jumbo to get stabilized.  As such, the image quality is as good as if you had the camera on a tripod.

Battery Life

Not good.  The battery is small and might be able to get you through an hour of shooting.  I haven’t tested it all the way from fully charged to failure, but I’m definitely going to get the larger capacity battery.

sidebar: I got a generic BP-315 from eBay… sucks.  Never again.  At first, it wouldn’t charge beyond 75%.  When I tried to “reset” it at the seller’s suggestion by draining it all the way and then charging it fully, it wouldn’t charge at all!

Digital Camera

The camera actually works quite well.  The picture quality was better than I expected and the controls weren’t as awkward as I expected.  I suspect the fact that the camera uses a CMOS sensor has is a good thing.  Also, the image stabilization that works so great in camcorder mode works just as well in still image mode.  Even the flash works essentially the same as any other point and shoot camera.  Finally, you also have the option of doing some manual control with shutter speed and aperture which I did not expect.  To tell you the truth, I did not expect to use this feature of the camcorder all that often, but now, I’m thinking I can probably leave the Powershot S400 at home if I’m taking the camcorder with me.

Other

I still have to spend some more time with the camera and play with more of the manual features.  I also was hoping to find some way to use the image stabilization only in the vertical direction so I can pan without getting any jerky movements in the horizontal direction.  I don’t think that’s an option though.  (Disappointing as my SLR lenses do this quite easily and effectively.)  Finally, I need to figure out how much hard drive space this thing is going to suck up and decide how I’m going to archive footage.  Along those lines, I may need to upgrade the computer as well if I can get some clients to integrate some simple videography into my wedding business.  We’ll see.

That’s about it for now.  I’ll post more impressions as I get some more time behind the lens.