Very good ergomics, easy to use, effortless to assessment pictures and video. Needs image stabilization–require a steady hand with this camera.

This is a extended review simply because I took a lot of time in researching the camcorder I needed, so I think my understanding and use of this point need to be useful to A person out there. I had my eye on this point ahead of it was out, and saw evaluations from some lucky folks who got their hands on it before its release. When I was ready to order, Amazon shipped it in a not very well packaged box, but every thing worked. It comes with a little remote, by the way, which came in handy when I connected the camcorder to our Television.

Preface: I am an intermediate video editor. I use Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, sadly not CS3, and I simply figure out menus of electronics without having needing to read manuals. So with that mentioned, this camcorder was ideal for me. For beginners, it is nevertheless effortless to use, but the more advanced capabilities take some button pushing to access. Still, the fundamentals are out in the open.

(By the way, I purchased the sapphire blue and it’s a lot more fairly in individual than in the photos.)

I researched for a long while on the web, and after employing the in-laws’ Panasonic DV, I knew what I actually, actually wanted right now in a camcorder.

These were my needs that I wouldn’t budge on:
Little and Lightweight
Microphone input
Much less than 0
Records to Flash Memory (Card)
As-close-to-fantastic good quality footage

These had been optional:
High Definition
Cold/Hot Shoe Attachment
Potential to add other lenses
Digital Camera

So, the FS100 is compact. I knew it would be little, but I had no notion that the complete point could sit in my hand. It also fits in my purse (and my purse is not a enormous “hobo” bag that a lot of girls carry about these days). Because there are no “moving elements” and every little thing is recorded to a small memory card (SD), the camcorder is also quite light and quiet. If it really is nonetheless not quiet sufficient for you since you are in an really quiet surrounding, use an external mic.

I needed an input for a microphone since, in the future, I’ll want much better sound for commercial purposes. Particularly for when I want to upload my videos to the web for promotional marketing (or maybe Amazon evaluations?). Or perhaps for recording footage of my very first child’s birth – curses and all. D This is one particular of the really handful of “customer” camcorders that enables mic-in.

DV is mentioned to nevertheless be of fantastic top quality, but SD memory cards are just too cheap and reusable to pass up these days. Unless you happen to be a pro editing video for skilled purposes, your finish-user is not going to discover the difference between DV and flash memory. Memory cards are also lighter, smaller, and quiet. They make it easier to truly get my footage onto a disc, or stored on a NAS (Network Attached Storage) so that I do not have a stack of unlabeled DV tapes that haven’t been watched since they were recorded.

Because the FS100 uses flash memory, recordings are stored as separate digital clips. Do you know what this signifies? This indicates my footage Won’t GET RECORDED Over. You do not know how many times this has occurred to me since an individual picks up the camcorder and thinks the tape is blank.

The clips can also be placed into a playlist you can decide on where you want the clip to begin, and voila – some basic playback editing devoid of ever leaving the camcorder interface. You won’t have to waste an complete DVD (or bore a viewer with holiday footage of your spouse snoring).

I utilized the FS100 *all day* in Hollywood, CA throughout an outing with two tiny girls and my friend. We were indoors, outdoors, in overcast, sunny, and shady locations. I also tested out the camera around our house and residence office. I set the camcorder to its highest setting (using a 16GB card) and widescreen format. I fiddled with the lighting possibilities depending on exactly where I was so that I got the most organic color. It handled like a champ and I will go into quality particulars in a bit.

Zoom functions amazingly effectively, clearly nevertheless has a bit of a shake in the end, but the stabilization seems greater than other camcorders.

I worried about the battery life simply because it seemed brief on paper, but employing it all day without having its Speedy Begin choice (letting it hibernate so you can just open the screen and instantly record a thing), was dandy. The battery utilised up about 25% of its power! (By the way, you can view how the battery is performing with out turning the camcorder on by a press of a button.)

Okay, CONS:

The programs it comes with are…crap. Sorry, but do not plan on employing them for considerably unless you will need extremely, quite fundamental editing capabilities. Do not even take into account making use of the nevertheless-photo camera. I do not know why Canon even bothered with it at all. Some cell phones take greater photos.

Because I have Premiere, I just needed to use my reader, but a 16GB SD card requires me to purchase a newer reader since it’s so significant. I…

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I’ve been avoiding getting a new camcorder to replace the eight year old DVC tape unit for awhile now. There had been lots of tempting offerings, but none matched the feature set and price point that I was searching for until I occurred upon Canon’s FS100 model at an Apple Store. Whilst giving it a the moment over there, I liked the light weight, the responsive and variable zoom, the microphone input, and that at 9, it was nevertheless very a lot reasonable in value. I practically bought it right there at the Apple Shop, but resolved to sleep on it initial and verify out what other individuals had been saying about it. I’m glad I did, and afterwards I virtually gave it a miss but made the decision that no other camcorder available currently in the this price range would meet my desires.

Let me say what I liked about it 1st. As mentioned just before, It’s lightweight and small adequate to match in most pants pockets (or are you just satisfied to see me?) without having generating you walk funny. The unit measures two.three-inches wide, 2.four-inches high, and four.9-inches deep. It weighs about 9.2 ounces. It begins up practically immediately and is ready to record within a number of seconds. It has a big 2.7-inch LCD display that is clear. It has a reasonably straightforward menu system for setting up some of the numerous built-in capabilities all of which a clearly displayed on the LCD. It has a variable zoom that can be as quick or as slow as the user may wish and there are some settings in the menu that permit you to adjust this even a lot more. The battery lasted practically 2 hours of close to continuous use for me (your usage will vary dependent on a number of aspects). In it really is highest video resolution mode, you can get nearly 2 hours of video from an 8GB SDHC memory card, although Canon states that you can get over five hrs of video from the exact same card at a lower resolution. Maintain in mind that whilst this camcorder does record in either 4:3 or 16:9, it isn’t accurate high definition and if that is a thing you should have in a camcorder, keep on seeking.



There are a amount of effects offered from the FS100′s menus, like fade-in/fade-out, Sepia, and Black and white recording modes, Mosaic, and a couple of other people of varying effectiveness. Most of these almost certainly sound like nice additions, but I doubt you’ll use them more than when. There are a amount of Automatic Exposure settings as effectively (AE in the menu) which includes Television, Portrait, Sports, Night, Snow, Fireworks, and so forth. Probabilities are unless you have distinct requirements, the Auto setting will perform just fine in most conditions. You can manually set the White Balance as nicely as the unit getting Car, Daylight, and Tungsten presets.

Canon does not provide any memory for this camera (although basically the identical camera models FS10 and FS11 has 8GB and 16GB constructed-in respectively for a greater price tag), so an SD (preferable an SDHC card) will be essential. I put in an 8GB SDHC card from Transcend that price roughly about and if even far more storage is needed the camcorder accepts 16GB cards as well.

A single of the principal reasons I bought this camcorder was that it had a microphone input. The input uses an business common 3.5mm jack (there are adapters offered for other sized inputs from spots like Radio Shack) and as long as Phantom energy is not essential, the FS100 really should be able to use almost any non-XLR microphone. The built-in microphone is really sensitive and does a pretty very good job, but is topic to some wind noise as most constructed-in microphones are.

Now some of the things I do not like about this camcorder. The image sensor is only a tiny a lot more than 1 megapixel. Still pictures look a small washed out and with each video and still pictures. The FS100 also does not do so well in reduced-light situations. I’ve used it now underneath some diverse lighting circumstances and have had varied outcomes. Fireworks seemed OK. The FS100 rapidly adjusted itself from practically total darkness to vivid bursts withe tiny effort. Also the FS100 had small difficulty with typical stadium lighting, but any constant low-light circumstance was not that fantastic.



The FS100 does take nonetheless photographs as well as video and it can shoot up to five frames a second. The image sensor as I stated is only 1 megapixel so this is a lot more like a quit-gap convergence answer for digital photography than a devoted point and shoot. If your main focus is taking photographs and you want them to scale well in various sizes, the FS100 is not the answer for you.

The included software program seemed next to useless to me or most most likely any other Mac user that already has iPhoto for digital images. The moment you have the camera plugged into a USB port and it mounts on your desktop, iPhoto really should (depending on your settings) automatically start off up. Downloading your nonetheless images utilizing iPhoto is fairly straight forward like most digital cameras.

OK, let’s talk about what this sort of stuff this unit is genuinely meant for: video. Honestly, even with the complaining I’ve completed (and I’m not…

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I’ve been hunting to update my old Sony Digital8 camcorder and have been searching largely at Mini-DV. But, this flash camcorder caught my eye since the cost of SD cards has grow to be amazingly low-cost. To transfer video from a DV recorder takes a lot of patience, gigabytes of storage, and hours of function. By contrast, a 4gig SDHC card in this camera can store an hour and 20 minutes at 6 mb/s. The camera will do 9 mb/s, but I do not recommend it if your final format is DVD since some players will have problems keeping up.

My suggestion is to ignore most of the instructions which Canon offers and keep the application CD’s in the box. There’s a cute warning attached to the USB cable which warns NOT to connect it devoid of initial installing the drivers. I linked it to my MAC running OS-X 10.four and a warning came on the screen to plug in the AC adapter. Once I did that the camera came correct up as a disk drive. The manual warns not to access the folders directly. I did that, too and merely copied them to the neighborhood hard drive (a lot more on that in a minute). Then, the camera warned NOT to adjust modes, or disconnect the USB cable, or disconnect the power. Ok… then, right after I dismount the USB drive, how do I unplug the camera The manual provides a clue to disconnect the USB 1st, then energy off.

By the way, it’s just much, a lot less hassle to buy an SDHC/MMC card reader and copy the folders off.

If you wish to mess with iMovie and other specialized software, then I suppose you’ll have to retain your file structure proper and adhere to the manual a lot more closely. I use Final Cut on the Mac, not iMovie, so my first concern was, What is a MOD file and an MOI file? That is what you happen to be left with following you copy your card. The brief answer is, toss the MOI files – assuming you are not making use of the on-camera editing functions. I just record and dump to the challenging drive and edit with Final Cut.

A MOD file (not to be confused with the music format file) is just an mpeg2 file with audio included. This will confuse some Windows programs which expect the audio in a separate file, so use Media Player Classic. Quicktime on the Mac had no difficulty playing the file, even though you may possibly will need to download the MPEG-two Playback Element. Lastly, the aspect ratio setting in a MOD file may possibly not be proper for WideScreen format. You might want Mpeg tools to appropriate the header if you shoot WideScreen.

Subsequent, Mpeg2 is not an “editable” format like DV. It is about 1/five the size on my program and a single 4gig card backs up nicely onto a single layer DVD-R. You’ll need to do some thing with the MOD files. My plan of selection on the Mac is Visual Hub which is really reasonably priced shareware. I merely dragged my Canon MOD files to it, selected “DV” and “Ready for Final Cut” and “Start off.” I was left with DV files prepared to edit, though 5x bigger. There is even a setting to force 16:9 aspect ratio. The catch is that you will want to re-encode back to Mpeg2 if you are burning for DVD.

The good factor is there are not any tapes to get dirty and put on out. Flash cards could be employed hundreds or thousands of times, unlike DV tapes which are utilised once or twice. The size of files are really modest and effortlessly archived, more than an hour of video on a single DVD-R of raw footage. But, re-encoding to DV and back to Mpeg2 will sacrifice some high quality. I feel it’s a great trade-off to utilizing a DV recorder because you can do in minutes what it would usually take hours or days.

As for the functions of the camcorder, it has an external mic jack. Thank-you Canon. Finally, somebody is listening. If you’ve ever had to record a conversation in a noisy room you will appreciate the capability to use a directional mic. No headphones, but it has an audio meter level display. White balance! Quite a few white balance settings as well as manual. Auto and manual shutter speed, exposure, focus, and audio gain at your finger ideas. And, an “Simple Mode” for complete automatic for those who hate buttons or just want to grab a fast action shot – press “on”, press “easy”, press “record” and you happen to be recording in seconds. No moving components except for the lens cap, which is automatic and built-in. No much more lost lens cap or one which is smacking into the microphone in the wind even though you’re recording. And, size – I can hide the camera in the palm of my hand. It’s tiny, lightweight, and effortless to shoot with out acquiring tired.

As for the not so hot stuff, the recording light is an LED. My old Sony Digital eight camcorder utilized a tiny light bulb which appeared as organic light. The LED light is undoubtedly much better on the battery but tends to make every thing blue-ish. Battery is internal, great style but you happen to be stuck with what ever capacity will fit into that size battery bay. Batteries and charging accessories price a fortune, though SDHC cards are low cost. The built-in microphone will require some acoustic foam glued…

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The Canon VIXIA HF S21 HD video camera is excellent. I’m quite pleased with this decision. The video downloaded rapidly and simply into iMovie 09 and I was in a position to effortlessly move the video files into Final Cut Pro. The bundled accessories are an additional story. The “fluid like” tripod is no where close to “fluid-like” in truth it is pretty significantly useless. The travel battery charger stopped operating after a couple of charges, the extended existence battery was defective (they did send me one more one particular that does function) the 16GB SD card is a class 2, which is not recommended for HD video recording. The only point of worth was the wide angle and telephoto lens adapter and filters. I would have been significantly far better off acquiring the camera and top quality accessories separate.

Took this to the Bahamas! Worked fantastic for the income! I looked at a lot of varieties and went for this 1. Glad I did. It did what I desired and was inexpensive! Got lots of very good underwater footage! Get it!!! Cons. Couldn,t see screen properly when making use of in brilliant light. Just aim aim and shoot. Works fine.

I was worried about obtaining to convert the compressed files from the memory card into editable files for FCP. Using Voltaic, I was in a position to make the conversion easily. The camera is so light, you hardly know its in your hand. The deciding element in chosing this camera is that it has a view finder – an critical characteristic for close perform. I love being able to shoot for lengthy periods and not obtaining to worry about changing tapes. It might not be the very best (technically) HD camcorder out there, but for the price, it is wonderful for most each situation.

This is a fantastic lightweight camera. I do not know the story behind latest pricing but I paid 0 for my camera.

Pros: The camera makes high definition video and you can decide on in between 1920, 1080, or 720. Most video I take is at the highest resolution. The camera can take nonetheless pictures. You can select in between recording with the view finder or the LCD screen. The sound recording is outstanding for small camera with no external mounted microphones. Pick in between recording sound in front of you or in 5.1 surround sound. My discovery is that surround sound picks up too much background noise such as cheering parents at soccer games.

Cons: My photo graphs are at a lower resolution than I would like and it takes a lengthy time for the camera to focus and set. The battery needs much much more juice and I am at the moment shopping on Amazon for a new one. The camera has been utilised on the field in the course of softball games exactly where dust is an issue and now the automatic lens cap is sticking and I have been unable to fix it. Video management!!! Did I know what I was obtaining into? No. I have recorded hours of family members vacations, softball, and soccer games. The purchase of this camera has led me to getting seven terrabytes of disk storage, a blue ray disk burner and diverse brands of DVD and Blue Ray media. My concern is long term storage of my newly recorded video. What to do? DVD’s do not last and Blue Ray can be even much less dependable more than time. My aim is to not let my video disappear like the old Super eight video from my youth and the VHS from current background. How can I safely shop video?

Video editing: Roxio was the most unstable plan I have ever employed. Period! Do not purchase it. I have had excellent achievement making use of Cyberlink Energy Director Ultra eight. I no long have Panasonic’s video capture system installed. I believe Panasonic’s video capture system was named HD Writer. I could not figure it out and it seemed cubersome to use. Two thumbs down.

Bottom line is Yes this is a great camera.

I personal this and recorded music video employing the panasonic and a sony ex1 you can see the outcomes [...] (When sonny gets Blue) The ex1 is a [...] camera the hdc sd100 was not as excellent but for the 10xless cost it held its personal. I required to tweek the final video with sony vegas but I was pleased. I enjoy the manual settings. the color is extremely excellent, the only downside was low light efficiency so I purchased some sima 20xls.