Tech Expert Holiday Gift Guide

9. Canon VIXIA HF200 Camcorder

We've got 20 gift ideas for the non-noob. The products featured here are big-ticket items chosen with very picky people in mind. Upgrades and splurges.

Canon VIXIA HF200

A few months back, I interviewed three professional videographers and asked them, “If you were a traveling businessman who had to produce pro-grade video projects at basement-level prices, which camcorder would you buy?” Two of them immediately said they’d pick the Canon VIXIA HF100, noting that it was the first sub-$1,000 camcorder able to deliver the picture-quality equivalent of triple-sensor professional cameras. The HF200 is the successor to the HF100 and preserves all of its predecessor’s benefits. Widely available for less than $600, this is the best consumer camcorder I’ve ever had the pleasure of using.

Part of the HF200's low price comes from the fact that it has no onboard storage. Instead, it uses SD Card flash memory. Just be aware that the camera prefers high-speed SDHD memory if you want to shoot in the 17 and 24 Mb/s bit rate settings. When I tried an old 133X Corsair SD card, the HF200 wouldn’t shoot at anything above XP+ mode (12 Mb/s). Much as I distrust committing video to something as small and easy to lose as SD cards, it’s definitely better than the hassle of tapes or the limited-capacity risk of an internal hard or optical drive.

The HF200 shoots at 1920x1080 HD resolution in MPEG-4-AVC/H.264 format in either 24p cinema or 30p progressive modes. The CMOS sensor’s true resolution is 2304x1296 (which is why still shots capture at 3.3 MP), and Canon packs on 15X optical zoom backed by SuperRange Optical image stabilization. On paper, these basic specs look pretty ho-hum, but the HF200 impresses more in the flesh. I like a camcorder that balances light weight (about 14 oz. loaded) with hand-filling girth, because I find this easier to hold without shaking than those little candy bar-esque TubeCams. Once you get the strap set to the right length, the start/stop button sits right under your thumb, while both the zoom lever and still-photo button are right under your index finger. Grasp the edge of the extended 2.7" LCD screen and you’ve got control over Canon’s straightforward menu system with a small joystick under your left thumb. Options cover everything from shooting modes to a three-second prerecord to gamma adjustment.

More impressive is that Canon, unlike other camcorders in this price range, leaves users prepared for a serious video shoot, which means having a microphone port, hot shoe, and an AV monitoring port. There’s also component and HDMI output.

My tests showed that the HF200 has some noise under moderate to low indoor lighting, but I’ve definitely seen worse. Overall, the camcorder does an excellent job of keeping footage sharp, well-saturated, and true to real-life tonality. When shooting in auto mode, very bright areas can have a tendency to blow out, but Canon still manages to capture more detail in the shadows than most in this price range, and I tend to prefer shadows over brights when compromise has to be made. Overall, the HF200 is an outstanding value, easy enough for most consumers, but packed with the features needed to produce some seriously impressive video. --William Van Winkle