Canon VIXIA HF10 Flash Memory High Definition Camcorder with 16 GB Internal Flash Memory and 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom
 | Average Customer Rating: Recommend With widescreen TV and HDTV approaching as a viewing standard, it's sensible that home video be compatible. That's the philosophy behind Canon's VIXIA HF10 HD Camcorder. You can have stunning AVCHD (Advanced Video Codec High Definition) format recording with the ease and numerous benefits of Flash Memory - No discs or tapes required! It's used in most innovative electronic products such as notebook computers, MP3 players, and cell phones. Record to both… Product details and pricing info |
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76 Customer Reviews Posted
- Awesome Product
- I am amazed with this product. Clear and very sharp images, lighweight and with a superb design. I'm glad I have bought this camera. Canon, once again, exceeded expectations.
I also bought, together with the camera, the SanDisk Ultra II 16GB/15MB SDHC Card and the Canon BP-819 Lithium Ion Battery, which I higly recommend.
Points for attention:
1. Focal Length: from my perspective, the camera should have a shorter focal length. 40mm is too limited. I'm considering buying the wide angle converter.
2. Video editing sofware: since this camera shoots in AVCHD, pay attention on the software you'll have to buy in order to edit your films. The one that comes with the camera is just ok. For Mac users it's a no brainer, but for PC user, like me, be aware that Adobe Premier does not edit AVCHD files. You'll have to chose either Sony Vegas Platinum or Pinnacle to do so. An upgrade in your computer may be also needed, especially for Pinnacle.
Bottom line? Buy it! But also order an extra battery and SD card to guarantee you don't miss anything! - 2008-06-28, 9 of 9 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Great little camera!
- I've had this camera for about a month now and have really enjoyed using it. It is light weight and turns on pretty quickly. Here is my quick review:
Pros: Small, lightweight, nice view screen, lens gets covered automatically, internal memory holds 2 hours of footage but you can add another card, quality is really good. Pretty good in low light situations. Steady shot is okay.
Cons: Had to upgrade the battery because one hour of power is not enough with the standard battery. The auto color balance doesn't always do a good job, especially when in nature. On one of my shoots people looked a little purple. I took care of this by setting the white balance manually when I'm outside.
Overall: I'm very glad I bought it and I would recommend it with the above understanding. - 2008-06-19, 5 of 5 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Excellent camera, almost all i hoped for, software is a little weak...
- This is an excellent camera, it fulfills all my needs, I'd have really appreciated a few more options but I can't really complain.(I wanted to be able to mount the camera upside down or sideways and would have liked a feature to flip the video so that the resulting pictures were always the correct orientation when played back... but the feature is not there... ah well), I'd also have liked a 'stop frame' mode, take a shot every 10 seconds and pull them together as a movie...
Other than these 'missing' features the camera is excellent, the small size, the ruggedness, the battery life, the video clarity, the image stabilization, and the low light behavior are all excellent (you will notice graininess at low light but all cameras do this and this is not the worst by any means)
My only gripe is that the video standard used in the resulting movie files is not very widely used yet so finding programs that can edit the video is difficult or expensive. - 2008-06-18, 1 of 2 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- Unmatched video quality marred by lack of support
- So I've had my HF10 for about a month now. I'm extremely impressed with video and audio quality. Provided you are shooting with enough light, playback in full 1080P is amazing. Low light performance leaves a little to be desired. Autofocus hunts a little too much, again mostly in low light. The onboard light casts a strange blue glow that my wife calls "The Alien Abduction Cam".
The camera is extremely light (other reviews have said the HF10 is about the size of a beer can - true that). Both my wife and I have no issues with the size. She has small hands, mine are a little ogrish.
The fact that the PS3 directly supports playback from the SDHC cards is a major bonus (I'm assuming other Blu-Ray players with SDHC slots will do the same). No need to burn off to a DVD just to check out something you've just shot.
As for the AVCHD codec. Argh, what a pain it is to try and edit this stuff. The codec requires lots of horsepower to edit natively and converting to HDV or WMV/AVI either takes too much time or lots of HD space. There are plenty of solutions out there that will edit AVCHD natively, but most of them are just plain garbage. I've tried several suites - Vegas, ULead, Studio Plus - but have found them to be unstable or user-unfriendly. I typically use Premiere Elements 4 on my PC for this stuff, but Adobe doesn't yet support AVCHD.
For now, I've been backing up the raw M2TS files to a couple of mirrored external back-up drives on my PC, then using iMovie 2008 on a MacBookPro to convert to Apple's Intermediate Code (dropping from 1920x1080 to 960x540 in the process - yes, you WILL notice). From there, its all easy editing but its still a painful workaround. Hopefully, Apple and Adobe will add direct support for AVCHD in the future, but then...I was thinking the same thing last year.
If you can overlook those issues (I almost couldn't, which is why I didn't get an AVCHD 'corder last year), you'll be rewarded with some spectacular video. - 2008-06-17, 14 of 14 people found this review helpful, Rated:
- First Time into the HD world
- I just received the HF10 from Amazon. In a word - amazing. I did a lot of research over the last year into different formats and models. I was a little hesitant to purchase this due to the price tag. But I have no regrets. I would strongly recommend this camera. Next purchase is the underwater housing.
- 2008-06-13, 2 of 7 people found this review helpful, Rated:
