Canon HF10 camcorder review

Even though photography is always my great passion, in 2008 I begun to get interested in video. I have thought a lot if buying the new Canon 5D MarkII, that is able to record HD video, or a traditional camcorder; in the end I have gone for the Canon HF10 camcorder for two reasons: price (it costs one fourth of the 5D2) and manual controls (the HF10 is far from complete in terms of manual controls, as you will see in this review, but the 5D2 has not manual controls at all during video).

This review describes the HF10 from the point of view of a nature photographer; I have this camcorder from very little time, so in the next months I'm going to update this articles with more detailed information and with my experiences in the field.

Main specifications

The lens

The HF10 has a powerful 12x optical zoom (4.8-57.6mm f/1.8-3.0, that is the equivalent of a 43-515mm on a 35mm FF camera). This lens is sharp at every focal length, even wide open, and it has very good contrast. Vignetting, flare and distortion are negligible; the only real problem is chromatic aberration, that sometimes is clearly visible, in particular at the longest settings.

Zooming is performed with a lever on the camera body; you can even select the zoom speed - a fast zooming is useful to choose quickly the right zoom setting before the video, while during recording is the better to use the slowest zoom (even though usually you have to avoid or reduce at minimum the zooming during the video).

The sensor

You may be surprised to know that the sensor of the HF10 is as big as...the sensor of a camera phone! Indeed, the HF10 has a 1/3.2" sensor, that is 4.5x3.4 millimeters! Nearly all consumer camcorders have very small sensors: it is the only way to achieve super powerful zoom lenses in compact size.

The obvious downside of such small sensor is that in low light it gets pretty noisy. When I tried the 5DII I was amazed by the image quality given in low light by its large sensor; even at ISO 12800 the video was almost noise free...in the same situation, the HF10 gives a tremendous amount of noise, that makes the video almost unusable. In good light, instead, the performance of the HF 10 is great; the wide aperture of the lens helps to use lower ISO (even though you can not set manually the ISO sensitivity).

As a photographer, I am sure that you will wonder if the HF10 can be considered as a super fast 2 megapixel camera. The answer is....yes and no. You can not take both great video and great stills in the same moment: for a smooth, pleasing videos you need slow shutter speeds (usually 1/25 with the HF10), while for sharp photos you need much faster SS, usually 1/125 or faster, that results in worse video quality. In other words, if you take a video with the only purpose of extracting stills, I recommend to use fast shutter speeds, while if video is the final purpose, I recommend slow shutter speeds. You can't do both at the same time!

An even bigger problem is the poor AF. 25 FPS would be great for action (even the Canon 1DIII has a maximum speed of "just" 10FPS), but without the autofocus of a SLR camera, it is almost impossible to get decent results with fast moving subjects.

Controls, Interface and camera body

The user interface is realatively easy to use, even though it is not as good as in Canon SLR cameras. The buttons are very small, and the joystick is lilliputian: it is not very comfortable to use, in particular for those who have big hands.

You can choose shutter speed or aperture, but it is not possible to set manually the ISO sensitivity. A full manual mode is not available: it is possible to set manually either the shutter speed (in a range between 1/6 and 1/2000) and aperture (from f/1.8 to f/8), but you can not set both manually. Even though it is possible to get good video even with aperture or shutter priority, I'd have liked to have true manual mode, so I could have set the shutter speed on 1/25 (from my tests it is the aperture that gives the best video quality; it creates a smooth, natural looking video) and the aperture on f/1.8, to get the maximum background blur and to force the camera to use the lowest ISO sensitity that can be used in a given situation.

The screen is large and sharp; it is easily visible even outdoors. After few hours my screen was already dirty with fingerprints, and unlike SLR screens, it is a bit more difficult to clean, because it is slightly recessed...not a big problem, anyway ;-) A nice thing of this screen is that it can be tilted and rotated, so you can frame the scene even from difficult angles.

The battery life is average at best; Canon claims 120 minutes of recording with a single charge, but in my experience the actual battery life is closer to 70/80 minutes. I highly recommend to buy a spare battery.

16 GB of in-camera flash memory allows to store about two hours of video, and you can expand this memory up to 48 GB, with SDHC cards. I think that flash storage is by far the best option for cameras and camcorders: it is more reliable than microdrives, it is fast and nowdays it offers good capacity at affordable prices.

Under the lens there is the stereo microphone; I am not an expert but I am happy with the audio quality.

Operation and Autofocus

The operations are acceptably fast, even though it is clearly not as fast as a SLR. The only real problem is autofocus...AF is a pain! At the tele end it is really slow, and in low light it takes forever, or it does not focus at all!

What makes it even worse is that there are not AF areas - the camera uses the entire frame to evaluate the focus, using contrast detection, so if there is more background than subject, the camera focusses on background. Now I understand why the Canon 5D2 and the Nikon D90 have no autofocus at all in video mode...it is better to have only manual focus rather than such crappy AF :-/

Of course, you can use manual focus even with the HF10...but it is the worst manual focus that I have ever seen; you have to use the lilliputian "do-everything" joystick, and go through the menus to find the (very poor) manual focus control.

Image quality samples

The HF10 is able to record video at full 1920x1080 pixel resolution, either at 50i FPS (50 interlaced frames per second) or 25p FPS (25 progressive frames per second). Personally, I prefer 25p, because it gives much better image quality without the need of deinterlacing. Other than that, with 25p you can get better stills from video.

You can select a bitrate up to 17Mb/s; note that Mb/s means Megabit per second, not Megabytes! 1 megabyte is composed by 8 megabit, so 17 Mb/s means that every second of recording needs about 2.1 megabyte of storage space. For example, 20 second of video are about 42 MB (20x2.1MB, not 20x17).

These images are stills taken from the HD video recorded with the HF10. The image quality is great! Click on the image to download the full size JPEG sample. Please respect the copyright! This image can be used only to evaluate the quality of the camera, for personal purposes. All other usages are prohibited.

Conclusions

The Canon HF10 offers great image quality at an affordable price; it has awesome full HD resolution, and a good 12x lens, bright and versatile. It is very light, it fits anywhere and it takes little time to learn how to use it.

On the other hand, the HF10 has many limitations and downsides. AF is crappy and manual focus is very difficult; it is not a good choice for wildlife and action. While in photography I always use aperture priority mode, in video I'd really like the have full control both on the shutter speed and on the aperture, that is not possible with HF10. The lack of manual ISO settings is another thing I miss.

The user interface is easy to understand - in few days I learnt all the menus and the options of this camera - but it is slow to operate and many times you have to search the settings you need between many menu options. It is very difficult to change settings on the fly, and the very small buttons makes the operations even more uncomfortable.

In conclusion, the HF10 is an honest camera for its price; I have many complaints, but keep in mind that I am used to expensive, top of the line SLR cameras; at $630, the HF10 does already a lot of things, and you can not pretend to have a professional camcorder for so little money!

In spite of its shortcomings, I am glad from my purchase, and I recommend the Canon HF10 to amateur who want to enter in the HD video wolrd without investing too much money. If I'll get really fascinated by video, in future I'll consider more advanced solutions, as the RED Scarlet (www.red.com).

Do you have comments or questions?

If you have comments or questions about this article, feel free to ask in the Juza Nature Photography Discussion Forum!