You enter Video Snapshot mode by pressing a hard-to-feel button on the left side of the camcorder, in the LCD recess. A blue outline appears on the display. When you press record, a highlight travels around the blue outline counting down your 4 seconds. The HF20 stays in Video Snapshot mode until you switch to playback or press the button again. While we like the way the display feedback works, we'd have preferred a separate record button, or a choice on the mode dial, rather than the isolated button.
Performance
Performance and quality are top notch at both the HF20's maximum 24Mbps bit rate and at 17Mbps. Recording capacities are about 5.5 minutes per gigabyte and 7.8 minutes per gigabyte, respectively. Canon recommends a Class 4 or better SDHC card.
The camcorder focuses quickly and accurately, even in low light. Battery life is pretty good -- about 1.5 hours -- and Canon sells higher-capacity batteries to double or quadruple that. Unlike the HF S10, the HF20 doesn't offer quick charging.
The optical stabiliser, as usual, works well out to the end of the zoom range. We did run into a problem with it failing to recognise our SD card after initialising it and using it for a couple of clips, but we were unable to reproduce the problem. Having internal memory as a backup, may be worth the extra price for some users.
Video looks great, especially considering the small lens, and is surprisingly sharp, with saturated colours and excellent exposures, with relatively few blown-out highlights. The DigicDV III processing does a solid job of maximising the dynamic range. Living-room light-level recordings look quite good as well. There's some noise and softness, but that's to be expected. The audio records crisply and clearly, too, although the microphone placement tends to pick up wind noise.
There are some flaws, however. While they lack the fringing we saw on the higher-end models, outdoor shots do show some haze over light, brightly exposed objects, and we think there's slightly more ghosting than usual on fast-moving subjects. Still photos looked good and even slightly better than those of the HF S10, although they're lower-resolution.
Conclusion
The Canon Legria HF20 is an excellent camcorder, but it costs much more than the competition. You could look at it another way, though: it's smaller and less expensive than high-end models like the HF S10, while offering many of the same features.
Additional editing by Charles Kloet
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