Canon Hf10 Quick Review

Well the HF10 has gone back to Canon :-( so I thought I'd better put a few words down about my experience with it...

First off, this camera looks good, really good. It's a world away from the grey plasticy
feel of my old MVX460. Everything feels really solid, even the little flaps and covers over the various ports. Most of the camera is a glossy black, which I thought might scratch easily, but after a week it seemed to have faired well.
My favourite thing about the HF10 when compared to my HDV tape camcorder is the format, namely, solid state. It makes a huge difference to usability. I no longer had to worry about where I was in the tape before I started to record. The number of times I've missed things in the past because I'd been reviewing some footage, seen something I wanted to tape, then missed it all whilst trying to fast forward back to the blank part of the tape. It also makes it really easy to copy your footage onto a computer for editing. I was using iMovie '08 and it couldn't have been easier: Just connect using the USB cable, plug the camera into the mains adapter (I assume this is to avoid loss of power mid flow and possible corruption.) Open the import window in iMovie, select the clips you want to import (they're shown as thumbnails.) Bob's your uncle, a few minutes later, it's all done. I found that the footage copied over at just faster than realtime. I'd hoped it would be faster as I'd used the 17Mbs setting (the highest quality) and USB is nominally 480Mbs. Perhaps iMovie does something during the import that slow things down. When we get our shop unit in I'll do some tests recording to media card and at different bitrates. I'm sure a lower bitrate and a nice firewire card reader will speed things up.
Quality wise I was impressed. I did notice some chromatic aberration and minor artefacts when I looked at still frames but the actual footage looked fine to my untrained eye. I'll try and get some reasonable definition examples up here.
I did find the lack of a viewfinder a tad annoying, I like to use the viewfinder when I'm zoomed in so I can jam the camera up against my head to steady the shot. However, the flip out screen is very high res and bright, so that helps make up for it.
The Wide end of the lens could have been wider, it was about 37mm (35mm equivalent) which was too long for my liking but no camcorders these days seem to come with a good wide angle lens. The sceptic in me suspects that someone wants to sell me a wide angle converter.
All in all, my first foray into High-Def recording was made easy by the HF10. The controls felt familiar, everything was where I expected it to be (except the menus to turn on external monitoring) and everything felt reasonably snappy and reactive.

Update - some HD footage, you may want to wait for the video to buffer before starting to play.
The embeded video below is not HD, click on the linck just under the video to see the HD version on Vimeo's website.


HF10 test (HD) from Alex Ray on Vimeo.