Well I’ve had the Canon FS100 for nearly a week now after ordering from UKDigitalCameras.co.uk and I thought I’d dish up a review for anyone out there.  Now previously I’d had a Sony SR32 camcorder with a 30gb Hard Disk which I bought last summer for £330 but looking back it was a bad decision.  The quality was poor and  very pixelated indoors and the hard disk could be noisy at start up (being a bit picky) but didn’t affect recording like a Mini DV tape.  So I looked at getting a new one either with a better lens or 3 CCDs and eventually I chose the Canon FS series, I decided against a HD camcorder as not only would my Powerbook struggle but I wanted to buy other things.

So it was between the Canon FS100,FS10 or FS11. As camcorders they are all identical in quality and set up however they differ in memory storage. They all accept SD cards: the FS100 has no in-built memory, the FS10 has 8gb internal and the FS11 has 16gb internal.  Now I opted for the the FS100 as it was the cheapest by £100 compared to the latter FS11 model and with this saving it was cheaper to buy a big SD card. My plan is to get a 32gb SD card soon and I’ll update you soon on that.

Anyway back to the camcorder; i was really impressed by its small size and lightweight yet sturdy build.  I have shot some test footage in best quality and its included below. However it would be nice to have a dock to connect the camcorder to the computer easily, like my Sony SR32 came with, and this coincides with my biggest gripe with the system.  When transferring videos, even with a full battery, you have to plug in the power cable. Now it might just be me but this means more effort,more cables and thus a messier table. Its a shame such a great product has such a flaw that hopefully could be fixed easily with a firmware/software update.  Besides this the process is very user friendly and the camcorder uses simple instructions to guide you through uploading.

Regarding actually filming; it is simple point and shoot but if you delve deeper there are some manual options with focus however unless you deeply spend time exploring these you won’t lose anything.  If you are a hardcore video film maker you really should be looking at something a bit more customisable and probably HD.  On that point this Canon FS100 does feature an external mic port to enhance the sound on the camcorder. Now after playing around with it I found the inbuilt mic pretty good picking up my voice from the opposite side of the room clearly but for those looking for a bit extra its nice to have it there.  The rest of the controls are well arranged and make the whole video experience easy with no “where’s that button” moments.

With these new non tape/DVD disc camcorders, the hard disk and flash versions mostly use a .mod format for saving video.  Now so far the major video editing suites (Adobe Premiere,Final Cut) do not use this format natively so usually a conversion is required which slightly defies the point of using simple files.  I know that Windows Vista plays .mods fine through Windows Media Player however for Mac OS X this is not possible.  I think this is the biggest disappointment, not only with this camcorder, but with most on the market and I hope the major editing suites and operating systems improve this within the year. The software which comes with the Canon, Windows only, does edit .mod and work however it is so simple I would stay away from it and use something better.  Saying that some new updates have been released and iMovie 8 works with this format and the Canon FS100 – shame it only works on Intel Macs and not on my PowerPC G4 Powerbook…

I’d recommend this camcorder to anyone coming into amateur film making or even to someone who takes it more seriously as it is just so well made, anyone will have fun using it despite the slight problems.

ADVANTAGES:

• Small
• Lightweight
• Good control menu system
• Nice automatic lens cap to protect the lens
• Good quality 37x Optical zoom
• Excellent battery life about 3hrs
• External Mic port
• Nifty battery level indicator without having to actually turn on the camcorder fully

DISADVANTAGES:

• Annoying .mod format. Not very Mac compatible if you are an amateur unless you have iMovie 8
• You have to plug in the power cable to transfer videos through USB
• Low light footage isn’t great
• The added torch is not really that useful at night time.
• Out of the box it has no memory storage and requires an SD card to be bought

Test footage: (Click on the video then select the high quality version underneath the video to see what the Canon actually records)

Test zoom footage: (Click on the video then select the high quality version underneath the video to see what the Canon actually records)

Test indoor footage: (Click on the video then select the high quality version underneath the video to see what the Canon actually records)

That’s it! I would like to thank the people over at AVforums.com with some of my decision making – they are very helpful!  If you have any questions feel free to comment below and I’ll get back to you. Thanks.

UPDATE: If you want to download the original .MOD files I have uploaded three here for you to test.  It will be interesting to see which software you use and if the files are compatible, please comment on your findings so you can help the rest of the community.

I have posted a guide to converting .MOD files to a more editable format which you might find useful here.

Clip 1 (80mb)

Clip 2 (40mb)

Clip 3 (Inside) (40mb)