Over the past couple of weeks I've been doing a ton of research about camcorders. Unfortunately there doesn't exist the equivalent of a dpreview.com or fredmiranda.com for camcorders and I've had to rely on a hodge-podge of reviews from different review sites with varying creditability and also reading the reviews off amazon.com.
While I love amazon.com and think it is a great site with often times great reviews, the lack of a "creditability" rating for the reviews leads me to sometimes be skeptical about the actual review quality - you never really know who is reviewing a product - is it a category pro or is it some kid that has no clue about the product but just happens to think that a product is rad because it has a metallic purple color?!?
From everything I've read though - and skepticism aside, the Canon HF100 seems to be one bad mama-jama of a camcorder. Despite the reported immature recording codec (that's geek speak for recording and compression format) - yes, this camcorder uses compression for the video stream, unlike HDV, this camcorders small size and reported video quality is making me have serious tech-lust.
Other camcorders that I've been considering are:
- Canon FS100 - Non-HD - I strongly considered this, but ultimately I am leaning against it since despite recording in a format that is easier and less time and computer intensive to edit, I just worry that I'll regret getting it 6 months down the line when I am aching for HD video quality. And besides, in the big scheme of things, the $250 price differential is really nothing.
- Canon HF10 - This is an HD cam, but I didn't seriously consider it since it is basically the same cam as the HF100, but it has some built in memory, but costs a ton more
- Panasonic HDC-SD9 - Another HD cam that records in AVCHD format. While being about $70 cheaper than the Canon HF100 and having a comparable feature set, many of the reviews I read, mention about the poor low light performance of this cam. I guess the noisy images that Panasonic is known for in their still cams carries over into their video cams too. While I happen to love Panasonic still cams and believe that their strong feature sets and lens quality outweighs the negatives, I'm not sure I could live with the noisiness in my video.
- great video and sound quality
- small size
- the ability to record to SD cards - I don't trust hard disk based camcorders and I hate the idea of having all the clutter of tapes
- Review from camcorderinfo.com
- Clips at Vimeo.com
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