What has this industry come too that we have to beg and cajole them to get features as elementary as a decent zoom lever? Simply amazing. Decent hand strap? Nah that's apparently asking too much. Ditto focusing ring or solid port covers!

Re zoom levers/rockers/whatever, why is it impossible for manufactures to provide some tactile feedback to indicate zooming speed changes?

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(minor gripes re this otherwise excellent review)

Hopefully they solved the problem with rattling batteries that plagues all HV20s. You did not mention it in your HV20 review, nor do you mention it here?

Also no discussion of a major issue with CMOS imager in this camcorder. As in HV20 Canon continues to employ an old scheme the so-called "rolling shutter" which can produce severe geometrical distortion in some shooting situations. (I posted one really radiculous example here). I find this close to unacceptable given that a solution (called "global shutter") is known and common in industrial cameras.

I take an issue with your statement that 24p "works just fine" on HV20. The fact is Canon decided to severely sabotage 24p in the HV20 by storing it in 60i and not including appropriate flags in their output streams which makes extracting the original 24p an extremely tedious exercise to say the least*. I realize you found 24p on this camera too poorly implemented to really bother with, but still it would be nice to know whether extracting a clean 24p footage from whatever this camcorder writes is doable and how hard it is.

Finally, some 15 years ago I bought an Hi8 Sony camcorder and the sound that camcorder recorded was an order of magnitude better than on Canon HV20. Given the same idiotic placement of the microphone as in the HV20 (Hi8 Sony had them in the front of the camera not on the top) I would assume the sound problem is as bad here as in the HV20.

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* contrary to what some have thought there is NO chance Canon will release new firmware to address this problem on the HV20 (24p being artificially converted to 60i) as true 24p is not even available on their prosumer $3k+ cameras, the best they offer there is 24f. Offering decent 24p on a consumer level simply makes no sense from the marketing point of view.

(hxxp://rapidshare.com/files/44450441/testmotion2.mov.htm)