Toshiba Camileo H20 user reviews
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User reviews3
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?!