Canon MV930 review

The menu system on the MV930 is navigated using a small joystick on the fold-out LCD screen. Although it's not quite as elegant as a touch-screen display, menus are clear and easily deciphered.

Transferring footage for editing in iMovie on our Mac G5 was easy. The MV930 plugs in like any other FireWire camcorder and was recognised straight away by the iMovie software. Transferring footage to the hard disk was a happy formality, with no dropped frames or other defects.

Canon bundled Mac and PC software with our MV930. This includes ZoomBrowser for Windows and ImageBrowser for Macs. None of the Canon software is particularly inspiring. Windows users will want to source an editing package like Adobe Premiere; Mac users will find iMovie bundled with their machines.

You can't dub your edited footage back onto tape using the MV930. As with most consumer MiniDV camcorders, you're prevented from making a recording to the MV930 from any external source. Luckily, iMovie will burn your movies to DVD or export them as a Quicktime file, giving you a range of options for playback.

Image quality
Colours on the MV930 are sharp and vibrant. Even during tricky exposures, where we set our subject against a bright background, the camcorder quickly picked up on the contrast of dark on bright and set the exposure to match the foreground subject.

Difficult exposures like this, with a stark contrast in the scene, did result in the background being extremely blown out (washed out in white), but the dynamic range of a single-CCD model like this is invariably limited in this way. Nonetheless, the MV930 copes with these situations well, often choosing to overexpose the general scene, with the benefit of correctly exposing your subject (often a person in shadow stood in front of a bright sky). This is often far preferable to the alternative, which is to underexpose the subject and correctly expose the background. You can manually adjust this behaviour using the on-screen menus.

In bright, sunlit environments where the dynamic range (the difference between the darkest and brightest pixels that describe your shot) is more forgiving, the MV930 is capable of excellent results. Footage we shot outdoors on a sunny day looked close to the results we've seen from camcorders costing several times as much as this. The MV930 should fare well as a holiday camcorder if you're off somewhere bright like Los Angeles or Capetown.

Low light performance is adequate, but as with all single-CCD camcorders, the quality of your image will suffer considerably as the light wanes. Artefacting becomes more pronounced as less light detail is captured to tape and you end up with a lot of muted colours and large areas of perceptible MPEG compression.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Kate Macefield