all digital camcorders

Advantages: tiny, easy to set up, effective wind noise filtering, good low light, long battery life, uses same battery as Canon G3 still camera, analog to DV conversion, plug & play with Macintosh iMove & Final Cut Express

Disadvantage: no external mic input, barely wide angle (about 35mm equvilent), not easy to hand hold due to tiny size and low weight

I locked this thing to a sturdy Gitzo tripod, set it four feet away from my 82 year old mom, and interviewed her over a 3 day period for a family oral history project. All shot on a south facing front porch, in shade. Excellent skin tones and audio. An external lapel mic would have been nice, but it would have inhibited her. The quality of the video, when locked down on a tripod is very good. Zoom is smooth and variable. Auto-focus did not hunt during long takes. The supplied battery would run for over two hours with the 2.5 LCD panel active. While the battery is compatible with my Canon G3, the AC adapters are different. Too bad. I like being able to share batteries. But at least I can use one device to charge a spare while I'm using the other.

Most cameras of this genre tend to be stonger on the telephoto instead of on the wide end. I'll be getting the aux wide adapter shortly.

After reading the reviews, I was a bit leery of purchasing this camera. Because it fit my needs without paying for a lot of features that I didn't need (memory stick, S-video output, etc.), I decided to get one anyway to try it out. The result is that I will keep it. One concern was image quality under low light conditions. It's OK. The depth of field is not great under low light which might account for reports of fuzzy images, but I found that it did focus on the item of interest pretty well. For low light, regardless of the camera, if you want good images, you should consider supplemental lighting. The night mode works reasonably well. Audio quality is fine. I had no problem at all with picking up sounds and voices from 15-20 feet away without them having to raise their voices. It doesn't have a mic input which wasn't a drawback for my purposes, but is, nevertheless, something that this camera should have. The biggest disapointment, for me, is that the image stabilization is a long way from what my old Sony Handycam was capable of. Even so, it's adequate for the purposes that I will be using this camera. All in all, this camera will suit most people's needs.

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