Canon HG10

In the past couple of years, Canon has held back from new camcorder formats, but that hasn't prevented it from producing some splendid products. Canon's HV20 (web ID: 125305) is currently the best sub-£1,500 HDV camcorder on the market and the HG10 - its belated first stab at a high-definition hard-disk-based product - is attempting the same feat.

The HG10 certainly has its work cut out, with competitors on their second or third generations, but a quick glance at the HG10's specifications shows immediate promise. It has the same 1/2.7in sensor with 2.96 megapixels as the HV20, the same lens, and matching optical image stabilisation. Instead of tape, though, there's a 40GB hard disk and footage is recorded to AVCHD instead of HDV, which allows you to store around 5.75 hours of video at the top quality setting.

The AVCHD format hasn't won us over in the past. Although the MPEG4 AVC/H.264 compression it uses is more efficient than HDV, the quality isn't quite comparable. As a result, the HG10's quality isn't quite up there with the HV20, with more motion artefacts. Colour fidelity is just as good, though, and in lower light the slight smoothing of detail reduces the visibility of grain.

It's not full HD either: despite the fact that the chip picks up 1,920 x 1,080, video is recorded at 1,440 x 1,080 (the top still image resolution is 2,048 x 1,536, however). But the quality is still very good - the best we've seen so far from AVCHD in fact. And the HG10 offers plenty of top-end features too, including a standard accessory shoe, mic mini-jack and headphone output. There's even a progressive shooting mode available, but we found it made the video look too jerky.

If you're serious about your video, the HV20 remains the recommended choice. But if you want the convenience of a hard disk, reasonable three-megapixel stills, and high-definition recording all in one package, the HG10 is the camcorder to go for.

Author: James Morris