A decent flash memory camcorder for the masses

A friend of mine wanted to get into video taping and asked me about still cameras with video capabilities. I talked him into a video camera since that's primarily what he was going to be doing with it. I'd previously researched a few of these, generally if it's a reasonable cost it's not a great product. There are a couple of these out for under two hundred...avoid them low quality issues there, then there are a few under three hundred, they get better but most often then lack a good optical zoom. Digital zooms operate by lowering resolution so those should also generally be avoided. This unit is getting fair reviews on most sites. This particular unit says FS100 A on the bottom so perhaps it's not exactly the same as the first model that came out.

We tried the unit out on the store and while the images weren't bad they were a touch grainy....that's generally what you see in low light with these units but this was better than most I've looked at. This unit has three quality modes, lowest fit only for something like youtube, next is pretty fair and high is the best but it's not HD quality just good tv quality.

Attractive features:
Flash memory recorder (no tapes or dvds to buy)
SDHC support (uses cards bigger than 2 gig)
3 Quality modes
small and light
good optical zoom
Screen can flip forward
Easy mode button
Good recording time (battery two hours, 4 gig sdhc can go that in medium quality mode)
Image Stabilization

What's in the box
Camera
Battery pack
charger
Basic software

What you need:
SDHC cards 4 gig or bigger (book says 16 gig supported)
A small case would be nice
More batteries and perhaps an external charger
One of those gadgets with a laptop hard drive in it that sucks the files off your cards so you can reuse them (digital wallet)

Controls:
Top back, power switch and lens opener (cover closes with power down)
Top back, zoom rocker switch, usual stuff
Back rear: record button and function selector, video record, still record, video playback, still playback
Left side: taken up by screen that flips out and can rotate also
Left side below screen buttons for playback and function, joystick for operating menus (not a touch screen, heck I say this is better anyway)
USB plug, power plug sound input jacks (mini jacks)


What I think of it so far:

I've only had the camera for two days, I've figured out how to turn it on and how to use the joystick to move around in the menus etc. I have not had a chance to look at the software that came with it. My friend sounds like he wants it mostly for youtube stuff which this can do easily but it can do better quality also. The camera records in mpeg2 natively so no fancy or peculiar formats to worry about, the controls are logical. I don't really care for the battery and card location but I don't see where else they could have put those except perhaps on top and that wouldn't work well either. This unit needs more light than a lot of tape units to operate, it says 100 lux in the book which is dim room light, it works very well in a comfortably lit office but it may not be the best for the kid's birthday party with the lights off; quality is excellent with good sunlight. Buy batteries and chargers off ebay they're ridiculous in the stores. So far I think this is every bit as good as my old 8 mm camera that I paid more for than this one. Time will tell but I'm trusting the canon name. He went ahead and bought the extended warranty on it just in case. I think it was a good purchase.

update 10-08: somehow my update that I did two weeks ago is not appearing here.  I took this camera to the target parking lot at night under just the parking area lighting, those lights are not daylight colored they are mercury vapor or one of the other lighting technologies other than incandescent or flourescent...those lights tend to go very yellow when shot on daylight film or daylight white balance.  The camera did very well adjusting for the different light automatically, the images were a bit grainy in medium quality mode but very acceptable, I tracked a bicyclist moving very quickly across the parking lot the focus was on and the images were not blurred; the camera handled it very well.  I also used the camera to shoot a karate class in a gym under sodium lighting it also handled that very well including the fast moving arnise stick class that was being taught.  I also shot a SCA heavy weapons fighter practice with this outdoors in daylight, in medium quality mode there was a little bit of blurring during really fast action (stick being swung downward from over the head they are very tip heavy so the tip of that rattan sword is moving quite fast), that has to do with frame rate more than anything else, full quality mode would most likely eliminate that little bit of blurring but until 32 gig sdhc cards get reasonable I'm probably just going to be using medium quality mode and cut the videos down when we want to post them on youtube etc. 

on sdhc cards: Currently 4 gig cards are pretty reasonable, we picked up two cards for fifty dollars at best buy, you can find cheaper on ebay.  8 gig cards are around 40 dollars if you shop, 80 bucks in the stores, 16 gig cards can be found under fifty dollars if you shop, haven't started seeing these in the stores yet but I'm sure they'll be similarly marked up.  I don't know if the extra fast 60X cards are worth the extra cost for this beast...research necessary on that one, I have not had a problem yet with the camera being bogged down because it can't write out to the card fast enough.  No matter how large of a card you get, get at least two and a data bank so while one is in use you can be sucking the other one clean to the data bank so you can wipe it off and reuse it.  This tech is very reliable and very stable, generally if a card goes you only lose a little bit of data and not the whole card, Lexar and Sandisk offer excellent warranties on their flash memory and while they're more expensive they have great warranties and are very good about honoring their warranties with no hassles and the products have excellent reputations. 

On batteries: On ebay you can get some low priced batteries, only drawback the packs do not have the "smart" electronics and will not charge in the camera or tell the camera how much charge they have left; they only charge on their own charger.  I'm starting to see higher capacity batteries but so far Canon seems to be doing their usual thing of not releasing tech specs so third parties can produce accessories for their cameras.  I need more batteries but I will not pay the 90 bucks they want for one at best buy.  I found them on amazon.com for 60, still ridiculous but better than 90 bucks.  Next purchase is some larger sd cards.  I bought a "image bank" that will suck all the files off the sd card onto an onboard notebook hard drive so I now have 250 gig of portable storage, quite a lot of video will go on there but I'd still like bigger sdhc cards so I don't have to keep changing in the middle.  You don't get an external charger with this unit but I found a third party charger on amazon for 18 bucks that also will charge off 12V...so I think between the extra batteries and the 12V capability I've got enough capacity to go for quite a few hours now.

I really like this camera still, other than the price of the accessories, Canon's sensors generally are superior in this type of product.  I'm considering getting the Samsung version of this product for myself, it's a bunch cheaper but I don't think it will have the quality offered by this unit.