Canon HR10 review

Performance
Video performance -- autofocus and exposure -- are pretty good. In sufficient light, the autofocus adjusts relatively quickly when panning from object to object thanks to the Instant AF, and the autoexposure corrects swiftly, as well. As expected, it's a bit slower in dim light, and the autofocus pulses slightly.

The 69mm (2.7-inch) widescreen LCD, with its playback controls on the bezel, works well enough for manual focusing, though it's a bit small. The eye-level viewfinder struck us as a bit coarse at first, but we eventually got used to it. The audio comes through quite clearly, but the wind filter didn't seem quite as effective as with past models -- perhaps because the microphone sits in the front of the camcorder, or the wind was simply stronger than usual.

Other operational aspects suffer from the DVD curse, however. Though there's no lag when starting and stopping recording, other disc-related tasks impose annoying overhead. For example, initializing a DVD-RW disc takes over a minute -- 17.7 seconds to bring up the initialisation menu screen and another 44.8 seconds to format the disc -- while a DVD-R takes about 40 seconds total, 20.1 seconds to prepare and 18.6 to format.

Since each disc holds only about 15 minutes of best-quality video, it seems like a good idea to format a bunch of discs in advance. When you power on the camcorder with a prepared disc in it, you'll wait 20.5 seconds for it to spin up -- at least with a DVD-RW -- before you can record.

At the other end of the shoot, it takes a while to finalise discs for playback. Though duration depends upon how much of the disc is empty, our test with a DVD-R holding 10 minutes of video -- 10 clips -- took four minutes to finalise. All in all, it's not really a format you'd want to use for shooting children's plays or sports.

Image quality
Like its siblings, however, the HR10's video looked quite good: sharp and saturated with reasonable contrast. Its automatic white balance does tend to be a little cool, though, and as with many models highlights routinely blow out.

Its low-light video looks better than usual for Canon, a bit muddy but with far less noise than we typically see. Plus the HR10's video looks mighty impressive on an HDTV connected via HDMI (the cable is optional).

Conclusion
If it weren't for the DVD/AVCHD double whammy, the HR10 might have more to recommend it. For now your best bet is to stick with one of Canon or Sony's tape-based HDV models, or at least avoid the DVD issue and opt for one of the hard-drive-based options.

Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday