With all these flash based card devices around nowadays most home consumer level computers are coming with multi-card readers built in. Some new laptops are gaining this luxury, although it is something Apple has chosen to omit from it’s Macbook notebook range, and not knowing when I’ll be upgrading in the future I thought I’d get a USB reader as I bide my time. Now I didn’t want a fully fledged, steel cased, multi-card, indestructible one as some seem to be but just an SD HC reader for my camcorder specifically. After seeing the wide range on the internet I turned to my old friend eBay. Now I thought the days of bargains were over on the auction site with a saturated user base however I managed to pick up exactly what I wanted for just 3p – Yes that includes postage from Hong Kong. Bargain – job done.
The downside is I’ve had to wait 9 days to receive it but it has eventually got here, true to the word of the eBay seller. It supports SD HC cards, which was my key requirement, and also matches the silver scheme of my Powerbook and other office equipment. Theres not much too say really about it’s process but the first time I plugged it in I did hit a bit of a hiccup. From my experience you have to have the SD card plugged into the USB device before you plug it into your computer. Not only does it work perfectly but it can also help not to corrupt the card although I am not too sure on the latter. Surely it is safer and recommended to do this and obviously to eject the USB device before you unplug your SD card.
Well I’m chuffed with a device that works at such a low low price and I’ll be using it quite often because it saves all the trouble with power cables and USB cables on my camcorder. All I have to do now is take out the removable storage and plug it into this little reader. Simple…It makes me wish all life was.
Yes so many of you know I just bought a Canon FS100 Camcorder and with many electronics moving towards flash or non moving parts media I thought I should expand mine. Now SD cards have been around for years but the new version (2.0 you could say) is the SD HC (High Capacity) cards and they can have larger storage; the biggest so far at 32gb.
Now this is where some confusion arises -- SD and SD HC cards are not entirely compatible with everything. For instance an SD card reader may not work with an SD HC card unless it specifies and these problems are hard to see. The confusion starts because they look the same but they work slightly differently with different device firmware to get that extra space on the card. I hope the manufacturers start to make it clearer on the packaging but we’ll just have to wait and see.
Regarding hardware and card readers it seems the market was a bit slow on picking up SDHC support. At the moment I know of only one reputable internal SDHC card reader and that is the PEAK All in One Reader which I could only find on eBay here but also google it to check. I’ve heard some good reviews from it but if you’re not wanting to fiddle inside your pc, or have a laptop (I’ll answer to both of those) then a usb card reader may be easier. Now there are tons of these on the market including SDHC compatible ones so be careful to choose the right one, but for your money the Sandisk MicroMate USB card reader looks good as well as the Integral SD reader. I’ll be buying one in the next couple of days and I’ll let you know what happens as it’ll be a lot easier this way with my camcorder not having to plug the beast into the usb every single upload.
Anyway I checked the internet a month ago and saw this 32gb SD HC card come out mid-August for £59.99. Yes you read that right -- £59.99 and thats a lot of money for such little memory nowadays when I could buy a 750gb External Hard Drive for the same amount. However the beauty, and large cost, comes from the fact it’s so small and there is no difference in size of a 1gb SD card to a 32gb SD HC card. With this installed in my camcorder I can get 7 hours and 13 mins of footage! Now that is amazing on such a little card! That’s amazing really and it seems larger cards are on their way soon as with all the sectors used on an SD -HC card we could see memory of 2048 GB! I can imagine next year this same card will be about £29.99 if that with electronic prices dropping so much in the past few years…oh well I can say I had one first.
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.
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September 8th, 2008 
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With all these flash based card devices around nowadays most home consumer level computers are coming with multi-card readers built in. Some new laptops are gaining this luxury, although it is something Apple has chosen to omit from it’s Macbook notebook range, and not knowing when I’ll be upgrading in the future I thought I’d get a USB reader as I bide my time. Now I didn’t want a fully fledged, steel cased, multi-card, indestructible one as some seem to be but just an SD HC reader for my camcorder specifically. After seeing the wide range on the internet I turned to my old friend eBay. Now I thought the days of bargains were over on the auction site with a saturated user base however I managed to pick up exactly what I wanted for just 3p – Yes that includes postage from Hong Kong. Bargain – job done.
The downside is I’ve had to wait 9 days to receive it but it has eventually got here, true to the word of the eBay seller. It supports SD HC cards, which was my key requirement, and also matches the silver scheme of my Powerbook and other office equipment. Theres not much too say really about it’s process but the first time I plugged it in I did hit a bit of a hiccup. From my experience you have to have the SD card plugged into the USB device before you plug it into your computer. Not only does it work perfectly but it can also help not to corrupt the card although I am not too sure on the latter. Surely it is safer and recommended to do this and obviously to eject the USB device before you unplug your SD card.
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Regarding hardware and card readers it seems the market was a bit slow on picking up SDHC support. At the moment I know of only one reputable internal SDHC card reader and that is the PEAK All in One Reader which I could only find on eBay 
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