Canon Vixia HF20 HD Camcorder reviewed

CamcorderInfo has a fresh review of the Canon Vixia HF20.

From the review:

Since it is $300 cheaper than last year's Canon HF11, we didn't expect the HF20 to put up the kind of numbers we saw from its award-winning sibling. What did shock us, however, was how steep of a downgrade the HF20 really is. Sure, it's smaller and lighter than the HF11, but it simply doesn't have the video performance to keep up with the intense pace set by Canon. Does the $899 price tag make-up for this loss in quality? Well, it depends. If you plan on using the HF20 to shoot in the dark, it simply won't deliver the goods. It measured a terrible low light sensitivity and the noise levels in our tests were way too high. The fact that the HF20 performed so poorly in low light is extremely disappointing. The Canon HF20 also had too many handling issues to get a free pass from us.
We found the menus to be confusing and the lack of a clearly labeled "Easy" mode to be disorienting for first-time users. The system for adjusting many of the manual controls were also poorly designed. Still, there's a lot to like about the HF20. In bright light, it measured an incredibly-high video resolution and its color accuracy wasn't half-bad either.
The camcorder features a decent set of manual controls, offers all the necessary ports and connectivity options (including a mic and headphone jack), and is a fairly portable device. It's 32GB of internal flash memory and inclusion of 24p and 30p frame rates also deserve strong praise.

Buy Canon VIXIA HF20 HD Dual Flash Memory w/32GB Internal Memory & 15x Optical Zoom

Read full review here.