Aimed at the home user, Toshiba's Camileo H20 1080p camcorder is available for around £170. You point and shoot, and it zooms and does everything else you would expect without any fuss or difficulty.
Positives
Setting up the H20 is very simple
indeed. You charge it, open up the screen on the side and it just
starts working. It's as simple as that. This simplicity carries through
to the operation of the H20 and makes it a pleasure to use.
Solid, reliable and attractive, the H20 also performs well -- as long as the conditions are right. Image quality is decent when you're out in daylight or in a well-lit room, but it's something of a surprise that, when the light starts to dim, the picture quickly begins to go very grainy.
There's a standard socket for screwing in a tripod if you need to, and, although some of the motion video you film may be slightly juddery, we can live with that in a camcorder that's already dipping below £170 on some Web sites. The 5x zoom also means you can end up with some excellent close-ups of someone or something you can't actually hear all that well. When you are in range, the microphone on the device handles sound recording very well.
The camcorder also has a few extra bells and whistles, including the ability to take still photos, which can be stored on the generous 128MB of flash memory. The flash for still photos works well in auto mode, but we'd like to be able to adjust it to compensate for lighting conditions.
Negatives
The H20's microphone does a good job of recording sound, but a minor niggle is that there's no standard microphone jack. Had
there been one, it would have been possible to use the H20 not only for
family-and-friends-type movies but also for video podcasting
and other more serious applications.
We'd also like to see a protective case included. The H20 comes with a little felt bag, but it won't do much to protect the camcorder in the event that you drop it. Finally, the H20's connectivity (USB, TV out and HDMI) is pretty basic for a hi-def device.
Conclusion
The ease with which someone who's never used a camcorder before can become a HD maestro in seconds raises the Toshiba Camileo H20 well and truly above the norm. But you can't help think that it wouldn't have cost Toshiba very much to include a few extras like a microphone jack and protective case.
Edited by Charles Kloet
Android App 
RSS Feeds 
iPhone App 
Newsletters
User reviews3
Add your review
Lucjan Tadeusz Kaliniecki 21 May 2011
Good: Good HD quality, comfortable to hold, good strap, comes with all necessary wires, stunning macro shots
Bad: auto focus can be slow, poor image stabilisation
Comment: impressed with the ease of use
tcong 23 November 2009
Good: Handy
Bad: Features
Comment: I’m bad I'm bad I'm
Howard Chapman 20 November 2009
Good: Stunning 1080p stills
Bad: Useless .MOVs; forgets its settings when lid closed; broke down after 2 months; useless service support.
Comment: IS THIS H20 THE WORST CAMCORDER EVER?
We were impressed by the Toshiba Camileo H20 demo video on their web site, so we bought one for my birthday last June to replace my Exilim EX-S600 (which is very good except for the illogical feature that the optical zoom is disabled when in 30fps Movie Mode).
We immediately liked the H20's stunning 1080p stills but then we tried it in Movie Mode - Oh dear!
The auto focus is painfully slow and as zoom-in is also too fast, the result is a blurred mess for a few seconds after a full zoom and even a partial zoom-in causes annoying de-focussing (clips are available if you want to see them).
Also the stupid thing cannot remember its settings, so if you set up exposure etc for a forthcoming shot of a plane, train etc and then close the screen to save the small battery whilst you wait for whatever to arrive, it loses its settings and ruins the shot!
The HDMI and AV outputs are excellent but saving the files to a PC gives awful results (unlike the Exilim's MPEG4 .AVI files, which are brilliant). The H20 outputs in MPEG4 H264 .MOV, which is supposed to work with Quicktime v7 or the player supplied on the CD but the results are abysmal, giving a series of freezes and jerks which make viewing an unpleasant experience (and yes, I have tried the K-Lite Codec Pack and other viewers)!
I contacted Toshiba at Weybridge about the above and they were about as useful as a chocolate teapot! They were slow to investigate and respond but admitted that they too had problems with their H20 (such as: "and I'm having a lot of problems with jerky playback on certain machines." and: "I can also see what you're saying about the focus speed.") but nothing was achieved except that they took so long that Pixmania's returns deadline was exceeded by months.
All of the above became virtually irrelevant on August 13th when I had to advise Toshiba that the H20 had packed up completely whilst being charged in readiness for our French holiday. They replied: "You have clearly got a faulty product, so there should be no problem with Pixmania issuing an immediate refund."
A package arrived from Pixmania/Fotovista on October 12th containing a replacement H20 with a Returns Note in French which quoted Toshiba's above statement in English! I tried to phone them but their automated phone
system only accepts references starting in "CCL" - but their Returns Ref starts with "V"!
Does anybody out there want to buy a brand new UNOPENED H20?!
See all 3 user reviews