ZR-10: Feature packed digital camcorder (update: 8/03/01)

This digital camcorder is very small, very easy to use, and has great image quality. Links to sample pictures and videos can be found at the end of this review. I have used the camera extensively for almost 1 year now. Updates are at the bottom of the review.

I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to make home movies, or who wants a camcorder to travel with, without having to deal with the size of other cameras. I would also recommend it to anyone who is looking for an easy way to put videos/stills online.

Purchasing it:
Finding a store with the ZR-10's in stock was pretty hard. At this time (7/00), these are hot little items that the electronics stores can't keep stocked. I just purchased it a few days ago from Circuit City for $810 with a free tripod and bag. The first unit I brought home kept chewing the MiniDV tape I bought (separately). I brought it back the following day, and got a new unit and tape which work fine. This is why it pays to buy from a physical store and not online!

If Circuit City is still offering the "free bag" promotion, be warned that the bag is so big it could fit about 10 of these little marvels in it. Not much use.

Picture Quality:
Digital format has inherently better quality than Hi8 or VHS-C. I can't really compare apart from what I've read on other sites, as this is my first camcorder. I'm very impressed with the quality.

Zoom:
Don't be fooled by the 200x digital zoom - this is just a marketing gimmick, and it doesn't mean anything - at 200x digital zoom, you're looking at only a handful of pixels blown up to the full screen - pretty useless. In fact, I disable the digital zoom most of the time (or at least restrict it to 40x), to avoid over pixellization.

The 10x optical zoom lens works very well, although other minidv camcorders offer better optical zoom. With the image stabilization, I can achieve relatively stable zooms without a tripod. Apparently image stabilization hurts image quality, but I have not seen evidence of this myself, apart from the image being a little darker.

Focus:
The automatic focus does a very good job most of the time. It had trouble with some scenes (i.e. filming the July 4th fireworks). In these cases, I switch to manual focus mode. The control knob for manual focus is a bit fiddly and can require a bit of effort to change the focus significantly. I am amazed at how close it is possible to focus with this camera - for example, when I tried to focus on my t-shirt, I could get as close as the t-shirt fibers (without any zoom).

Digital Still Photo mode:
All this appears to do is to take one frame and freeze it on the tape for 5 seconds while you can record comments. There is no viable way to download this to your PC without using a FireWire port. The only other way is to buy an extra canon accesory which is a disk drive to store the photos on. This is pretty useless though: the resolution is poor (for digital still quality) and there is no flash. Other digital cameras have done a much better job of this, but be careful you don't spend so much for this feature that you could just get a digital camera by itself! Please check the bottom of the review for continued updates on my experience with digital stills.

Size:
This is the first true "palmcorder" camera I have seen. At this time, it is the smallest camcorder I saw in all the electronics stores.

User Interface:
Wonderful. Canon did a great job programming an easy to use interface. The menus are easy to navigate, and written in English. I learned how to control most of the features of the camera without even picking up the manual.

Viewfinder:
The viewfinder, which can swivel like the best of them, has good quality, although is not too big (I believe only 2.5").

Low-Light mode:
The low light mode can operate at as low as 2 lux (2 candles). It does this at a substantial cost of frame rate, although this can result in some interesting effects for fast moving objects. I'm not sure how it compares to Sony's night shot mode, which operates at 0 lux.

Digital Effects and Faders:
I haven't played with these much, but the ZR-10 offers the following effects: Art, Black and White, Sepia, or Mosaic. The faders are Fade Trigger, Vertical Wipe, Horizontal Wipe, and Mosaic.

Battery Life:
The battery length is competitive with other MINI-DV cameras. The Canon ZR had a problem with short battery life (I believe I read half an hour), but in the ZR-10 they have overcome this problem.

Firewire Port:
Very easy to install, and works very well. A Firewire card can be purchased very cheaply these days.

Summary:
This is a very well built camera. Canon has put a lot of thought and design work into a good product. I kept getting surprised by little "extras" I didn't expect at the low-end of the digital camcorders (i.e. diopter adjuster on the viewfinder, battery recharge indicator, SVideo output, audio/video line in, etc.). I would strongly recommend this camera , except to people who are looking for a great built in digital camera.

Thanks for reading! I try to keep all my reviews up to date, so please check them out!

UPDATE 9/12/00:

I still love this camcorder. The biggest problem I have found with it is that it is not a progressive LCD. This really limits it's usefulness for digital stills, and even video has many visible jagged edges on a computer monitor. Please see my home page, www.ianandwendy.com in the Our New Home/Our New House for sample still image/video. The image of the completed house is done with the camcorder (you can see the jagged edges when you look at the full size image by clicking on it). Also, watch the video walkthrough of the house, as that was filmed on the ZR-10.

UPDATE 12/8/00:

Still no problems! I have found the light metering is somewhat problematic when taking stills. It takes an average of all the light of the field of view to determine the exposure level. However, the ZR-10 does have the ability, like a lot of real cameras, to "fix" the exposure level by pressing the "photo" button half way down, then taking a picture of something else. And of course, in the LCD you can see an exact preview of this. Great feature that is apparently not easy to find on digital camcorders.

I now have hundreds of photos taken with this camera on my website. Check out the France page, in the Our Trips section. All of the pictures in this section are taken with the ZR-10.

Final update: I have used a de-interlacing filter to fix the jagged edges of pictures. This filter is available in most photo editting programs (i.e. photoshop). It works extremely well and greatly improves the quality of the stills that have jaggies. ALSO: With a program called "VirtualDub", it is possible to "deinterlace" an entire video image file. It's not easy at this point to do this, as video editting software (in my experience) is not very mature. If you get stuck doing this or have other questions, send me an email.

UPDATE 01/09/01:
Here's a tip: Don't bother using the PHOTO button, unless you're using their specialized hardware (which costs a bundle) to scan it in. Instead, just point the camera at what you want to take the photo of and record for a few seconds. Reason is this: When you use the photo button, it freezes the current frame on tape for 6 seconds. However, if this frame happens to be very jagged (interlaced problems), then it's a waste of 6 seconds! You're much better off simply filming for 6 seconds with the camera as steady as possible, then you'll have 6 seconds * 30 img/sec = 180 images to search through for one that doesnt have jagged edges to grab a still from.

In other words, the PHOTO button does *nothing* to stabilize (i.e. deinterlace) the photo you took. It does not have progressive scan ability.

UPDATE 08/03/01:
Well the camcorder survived a trip to the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, but it gave me a bit of a fright. During my holiday, it was very hot, and very humid - 100 degrees with 80 to 90% humidity.

The first few times I filmed, no problem. Then, I noticed the picture was corrupted every time I played it back. Both video and sound were badly corrupted. My wife kept telling me "Keep recording, it's only the playback that can't handle the humidity". I didn't agree with her, since the footage I'd filmed at the beginning of the trip played fine, it was only the new footage that was bad. I kept filming anyways, and I was sure glad I did.

As soon as we got back to California's dry climate and reviewed our footage, everything turned out to be perfect. No problems at all.

So, lesson is learned: The camera playback does not perform well in humidity. But it recorded fine, which is the most important thing! I'd think twice about buying this camera though if I lived in Florida.

Thanks for reading.