Digital Camcorders DV Canon Vixia HG20

Executive Summary Review about Canon Vixia HG20 by: Joshua Goldman and Lori Grunin

Digital mini dv camcorders

The good: Excellent video quality; 60GB hard drive; attractive, understated design.

The bad: Wind filter not as dependable as previous Canon models; manual focus pretty useless.

The bottom line: Like its cousin, the flash-based HF11, digital camcorders DV Canon’s Vixia HG20 delivers excellent HD video quality and performance albeit in a slightly larger, heavier package. However, you do get more storage space and a lower price.

Specifications: Video input type: Camcorder; Optical zoom: 12 x; Media type: Hard disk drive, Flash card

Price range: $599.00 – $744.55

The digital camcorders DV Canon Vixia HG20 is an excellent HD camcorder that’s reasonably easy to operate out of the box and looks good, too. It’s almost identical to the company’s Vixia HF11, but rather than recording mainly to internal flash memory, it records to a hard drive. The obvious is the HG20′s 60GB hard drive versus the HF11′s 32GB internal memory. Ironically, there’s more differentiation between HG20 and its brother, the HG21: in addition to a larger 120GB hard drive, the HG21 offers an eye-level viewfinder.

Aside from capacity, it’s really just a matter of size and weight separating the digital camcorders DV HG20 and HF11; the HF11 is smaller and lighter at 2.9 inches wide by 2.5 inches high by 5.1 inches deep and 15.1 ounces to the HG20′s dimensions of 3.1 inches wide by 3 inches high by 5.4 inches deep and 17.6 ounces. Most notably the dial to switch from video/still record to video/still playback is on the back for the HG20, on the side for the HF11. The HG20 records AVCHD video at a maximum bit rate of 24Mbps, and can hold up to 22 hours 55 minutes of video at the lowest bit rate of 5Mbps. (There are five quality settings in all, which I find excessive.) You can record best-quality movies to SDHC cards as long as it’s a Class 4 or better (Class 6 is currently fastest)

For video, these include aperture- and shutter-priority exposure modes, 3 fixed/1 variables zoom speed options, a video light, Instant AF, and a wind-screen filter. For still photos, metering, flash, and burst and exposure bracketing, options become available as well. The lens performs surprisingly well. The microphone attenuation (zoom mic) works pretty well, too.

For the most part, the 24Mbps video is indistinguishable from the 17Mbps except in low light; when viewed on a large-screen plasma TV, the higher bit-rate video displayed significantly more luminance noise than the lower bit rate. The lower bit-rate video looked slightly softer, however.

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