3. Canon: Full Options

The Canon HR10 handles well. The essential buttons for navigating in the menus are located just next to your thumb, near the record button, which makes it possible to operate the camcorder with one hand. One slight fault is that the Off button falls just below your thumb, and could be pressed at the wrong time - not a good idea when using DVD.

There’s also a color viewfinder. This was a good idea on Canon’s part, but unfortunately this one is too small, and won’t be of any real use.

Once in your hand, switching the camcorder on is easy. The first thing to keep in mind is that each DVD must be formatted as either SD or HD at the start. Be careful here, because once it’s done there’s no going back, and you’ll need to change disks if you want to change resolution (SD or HD). Four quality levels are available in HD mode, ranging from 5 to 12 Mbps.

The 2.7" LCD display features excellent resolution, and also very good sharpness. It’s adjustable in all directions and of course is anti-glare. We were simply amazed by the quality of the color rendering on the display, but we’ll go into more detail about that in our tests.

Navigation in the menus is very simple and well thought out, and the interface is intuitive, though we did notice a little less than a second’s delay between button press and reaction.

Instant Autofocus

Manual focusing is done with a small joystick. Using it is not easy, despite the presence of a very useful Assist function that zooms on the center of the display to let you fine-tune adjustments. There are two autofocus modes:

• The first, Instant AF, is very fast and effective.
• The other mode, Normal, is much slower.

The manual mode is accessible via a rapid-access Auto/Manual button, which is another good piece of design. So is the Quickstart button, which lets you pause and record instantaneously without the wait times associated with startup. This is very good to have if you want to pause the camcorder to save the battery, but may need to start shooting in a hurry.

A Wealth of Adjustments

Options and adjustments are numerous. The display shows a lot of information about image quality and the various settings (exposure, battery, etc.), associated with operation. The zoom (10X, with several speed adjustments) is effective, though in general it lacks punch and quickness.

There are six preset modes, in addition to auto and manual. There are black-and-white and sepia modes, plus other, more "artistic" functions. Various effects are available for adjusting contrast. Finally, the photo mode lets you shoot still photos with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels.