An excellent camcorder

Considering the Canon HF100 camcorder is over a year old and with a new model out, the price still hasn't dropped that much. I reckon it's because the demand is still there cuz I had difficulty finding one.

After using it for some days, this little camcorder delivers everything it promises..at least for what I'm using it as. Videos are clear and sharp. Audio is great. Recording to SDHC card is a dream come true! I did notice some noise during low light shots but lets face it, every consumer camcorder out there at this price range has noise at these lighting conditions.

I'm using the PAL version and I edit in my friend's Sony Vegas Pro 8c. Everything worked as I thought it would be. After shooting, I just take the SDHC card and copy the files to the hard drive. Then I open those files directly in Vegas and start editing. It's as simple as that! 50i or 25p, no problem. No transcoding or whatever. One thing though, your PC needs to be fast. Really fast. My friend's laptop has a Core2 Duo P8600 with 3 gig ram and it struggles just to play the mts files smoothly. I'm not saying it won't play. It plays but it's jerky..well at least I can edit on them.

I did find 2 small design flaws.

In the movie recording mode, if you were to output the video via the av output to an external monitor, be sure to use a widescreen tv or else the video would look out of shape - everything looks taller. There's an option to output to a 4:3 or 16:9 tv but only in the playback mode.

Another thing is if you've got something plugged into the av/headphones out during playback, the video in the LCD screen would shrink to about 75%. It's annoying when you just want to view the last scene recorded with your headphones plugged in. Minor issue but for whatever the reason, only Canon knows why.

Apart from those 2 little things, this camcorder is trully amazing. Well I guess it's safe to say 'goodbye good ol tape' and hello AVCHD!