Canon’s HV10 is their first consumer-end HDV camcorder. It is up against some fierce competition with Sony’s HC3. CamcorderInfo has their Canon HV10 review up and it is definitely worth reading if you are looking to buy this digital camcorder.
The Canon HV10 performed beautifully in normal light. Color balance was good and the picture was not as contrasted as the Sony HC3, which gave it a slight edge. It also outperformed the HC3 in video resolution, producing more lines of resolution.
Manual controls are also a major improvement on the Canon HV10. While there aren’t many of them, there are certainly more than on the Sony. However, for ease of use, the reviewer places the HC3 above the HV10 mainly due to poor ergonomics.
And now to the sad part. Camcorders using CMOS sensors have been around for a long time, but the HV10 being Canon’s first CMOS based camcorder definitely shows in its low-light performance. In this arena, Sony’s offering fared much better, while the Canon HV10 suffered from a lot of noise and color degradation.
So what is the overall conclusion? Which camcorder should you buy? Read the full review to find out:
Thanks for the review, which will definitely help buyers to make a more informed decision when selecting high-definition consumer products.
I would like to add one comment, though. The review states that \”Canon HV10 records in 1080/60i, that’s a resolution of 1920 x 1080 at 60 interlaced fields per second\”, which is not accurate. Although the full resolution of 1080i ATSC standard is indeed 1920×1080 pixels, but HDV resolution is limited to 1440×1080. The pixels are anamorphic, i.e., they are stretched horizontally to provide 16:9 aspect ratio of the whole picture.
Lance
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