Canon VIXIA HF100 Flash Media Camcorder

The HF10 is a great camcorder. Recording technology has really come of age: it takes 1080i widescreen HD movies, it's fully solid-state, and now that a 16 GB SD card costs less than £20 there's no point in buying the HF100 that has 16 GB of extra internal memory as well for about £100 more. The AVCHD format used for recording is the same as is used on BluRay discs, and the movies taken by the camcorder can in principle be written direct to DVDs and played in full HD on a BluRay player.

The downside is that editing and storage technologies haven't really kept up with the recording ones. The ImageMixer 3SE editing software that comes bundled is very primitive, and also needs an extremely high-performance PC (dual-processor Pentium and 2 GB is about the minimum). So if you want to do anything with the movies you record you'll need to buy a higher-end editing suite such as Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum (£50 and up) and again have a high-powered PC. And the size of the videos will pretty quickly eat up a 1 TB disc and challenge your backup capabilities.

So the HF10 itself is a great piece of kit, but make sure that you're prepared to buy in to all the other things that owning it implies.

I bought and used this camcorder for a documentary shoot in the deserts of Nevada. Why this model? because it's got no moving parts, so it wouldn't break easily. Because its images are sharp and strong. Because I can plug an external mic into it. Because it's cheaper than the newer version, but its features aren't really inferior (apparently the new version's higher quality recording level isn't that much better). Because it's cheap enough that if I trashed it, it didn't matter.

Results: I'm fairly happy with it. The manual tools are a bit weak. also you need to buy Neo-scene or something similar before you can edit AVCHD footage properly. However, on balance, I'd go for the same product again.

Great video camera and very small. HD output is staggering. Easy to use.

Don't forget to buy an SD card as it has no internal memory, you will need one of the fast ones and about 4 - 8 GB minimum.

Took a while to get it to import to iMovie - tip: you have to have the power supply attached, then plug in USB, switch camera on, switch to view mode, screen should ask if you want to connect to PC or to DVD burner, select the obvious, open iMovie, and it should let you import. Be warned HD movies take forever to process!

This is the first camcoder I have ever used. I have chosen it after a research over internet. I have read a lot of reviews. And yes this is a perfect camera. It takes also very good still pictures.