Canon HV20 review

When Canon first showed us the HV10, we were surprised that the company chose a vertical form for its first compact high-definition camcorder. In our review, we found that the vertical design brought with it some irksome ergonomic issues.

Canon's follow-up, the HV20, includes all the same features as the HV10, plus 24p recording, an HDMI output, a longer-lasting battery, and an accessory shoe -- all in a horizontal design that's more comfortable to use.

Design
Canon's horizontal design has solved certain problems, but also made for a larger camcorder. You can fit the HV20 into a jacket pocket, but it might be a tight fit depending on the jacket.

Canon locates most of the camcorder's controls in convenient places. The only real victims of placement here are the two switches on the right side of the body that let you switch between auto or program modes, and MiniDV tape or MiniSD flash memory card media. Granted, you won't need to switch these while shooting, but they'd be easier to deal with if placed on the left side.

Canon generally parcels out its menu-based controls well, making the most used items, such as exposure compensation and microphone level, quickly accessible by pressing the joystick. At the same time, other oft-accessed controls -- program, shutter- and aperture-priority, cine and scene modes, along with the white balance, image effects and still-image mode -- hide behind the function button.

As usual, Canon puts four buttons below the camcorder's 69mm (2.7-inch), widescreen LCD. These buttons let you zoom in or out, start and stop recording, access focus assist mode, and double as playback controls.

Unfortunately, Canon doesn't let you change white balance while shooting, so if you move from one type of lighting to another, you're forced either to stop then restart shooting or to accept the resulting colour cast.

Features
Part of the reason for its increase in size over its predecessor is the HV20's 10x optical, f/1.8 to f/3 zoom lens, which includes the company's Super-Range Optical Image Stabilisation.

Unlike standard optical image stabilisation, this version incorporates feedback from the processor to fine-tune its shake-fighting adjustments. In our field tests, it proved effective well past the typical 75 per cent of the room range, but still couldn't perfectly steady our handheld shots when zoomed out to the 10x maximum.

Instant Auto Focus, which employs a helper sensor on the front of the tape compartment to measure the distance to your subject, proved very fast indeed. But it slowed considerably in low light, which is just as much of a challenge for the helper sensor as it is for a normal AF sensor. Be sure you don't accidentally cover up the helper sensor, or your AF performance will slow to subsonic speeds.

We also noticed a tendency for the HV20's AF to hunt, especially in moderate-to-low light, and it occasionally focused on the wrong thing, such as a fence rather than what was behind the fence. Both of these issues seemed to happen more at the far, 10x end of the zoom.

Behind the lens, Canon places a 3-megapixel, 1/2.7-inch CMOS sensor that captures 1,920 horizontal and 1,080 vertical pixels for either 1080i high-definition or wide-screen standard-definition video. In the case of standard definition, those pixels are downconverted to fit the format. For still images, the camera captures 2.76 megapixels (1,920x1,440 pixels) in 4:3 mode and 2.07 megapixels (1,920x1,080 pixels) in 16:9 mode.

Atop the lens, Canon places its Advanced Accessory Shoe. Technically, you can call it a hot shoe, because it can provide power to accessories such as video lights and directional microphones.

Canon tries to appeal to a more-advanced level of user with this model's 24p shooting mode. Meant to mimic the 24fps frame rate of film, the mode does a good job of that, though its slower frame rate may cause fast-moving subjects to become somewhat choppy when compared to 30fps video.