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Reviewed by UK Guest, 11th Jan 2007. |
| Review Summary: Great entry-level camcorder |
Overall Score: 5/5
 
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Review: I've had this Canon MV930 digital camcorder for a month now and I'm very happy with it.
The case feels solid, if a little plasticy, and it has a good weight to it considering its small size. It's easy to use with nicely placed controls, a large clear screen and simple menus. It has easy and professional modes of operation, selectable with a switch, but easy mode simply removes various menu items, some of which are quite useful.
Picture quality is generally excellent with vibrant colours and crisp edges, so long as the light is good. Indoors or in low light the image does become a little noisy but it's still more than adequate. The image stabilisation does a great job compensating for shaky hand-held shots, particularly on high zoom levels but it's worth turning this off for tripod shots as it does reduce the resolution slightly.
It has a useful 25x optical zoom and the zoom lever gives very precise control, allowing for slow and steady zooms or fast adjustments. After a rapid change in zoom it can take several seconds for the autofocus to catch up, so it's best to keep the movements quite gentle.
Audio is functional but nothing special. In quiet situations the tape motor is quite audible on the captured video. There is no connection for an external microphone so unfortunately you're stuck with this.
Transferring the footage to a PC is child's play. I quickly ditched the supplied software in favour of Windows Movie Maker. A couple of clicks rewinds and captures the entire tape, chopping it up into individual clips ready for editing. The transfer happens in real time, so a 60 minute tape takes 60 minutes to transfer to PC. The footage arrives as AVI at a native resolution of 720x576, which is stretched during playback to 1024x576 for the correct aspect ratio.
One word of warning. Although the specs list USB2.0 connectivity, they don't mention that this is for still image transfer only. Video transfer still requires a firewire connection, as I discovered to my annoyance only after receiving the camera. Luckily I was able to get a NISIS firewire card from amazon for under £5 which does the job wonderfully.
Overall, this is a great little camera. Image quality is much better than I expected for the price tag. Sadly the audio isn't up to the same standard, but for me it's still worth 5 stars. |
Ratings
| Value For Money: |
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5 |
| Review Score: |
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5 |
| Recommended? | |
Yes |
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Digital Cameras