I am looking to get an HF20 to replace my Sony HDR-HC1 which I have been using since 2005.

Couple of quick questions:

1. Will the HF20 be able to do things as the Sony did like adjust for spotlights (in performances) and change white balance
2. See discussion here about 60 minute battery life for the standard battery. Can you purchase a higher capacity battery and if so what would be its expected life? My standard sony batter is just over 60 mins but the high capacity one is about 3 to 4 hours.
3. Someone here mentioned a possible restriction on recording concerning a maximum file size? If I use this HF20 to record video at a 5 hour wedding, will I be able to shoot until the 32 gb SD card is full and then just pop in another one?
4. How significant is all this discussion about this camcorder's issues with low light (compared say to the one I currently use the 5 year old Sony HDR-HC1)

Thanks,
Joel

Hello Joel,

I'm looking for the same thing - as to replace Sony HC1 with something newer (possibly from Canon).

I bought HG10 for my girlfriend and noticed few problems, which would prevent me from buying Canon for myself - and these probably would answer questions regarding quality and low-light situations.

I don't know if the latter camcorders HF100/HS10 have the same problem as HG10, and asked a question here to find if somebody can answer it.

Here is what I found about Canon HG10:

• The picture on Canon camcorder is always tinted - either a bit yellowish, pink, or green. There is no color contrast with neutral grays - like we see in HC1. With Canon everything looks a bit soft and tinted.
• Highlights on everything-Canon are blown out. It's not unusual, when filming bright objects - that they turn completely white.
• Canon has some very unpleasant trailing (probably due to built-in noise reduction, which cannot be switched off), which makes sometimes sky-blue or wall-gray overlap people's faces.
• Canon does not have a touch screen, there is no spot-based exposure, as far as I know.
• It's very hard to do any color post-correction, as the compression artifacts and chroma deficiencies seem to show up easily.

http://www.yohng.com/pvt/trailing.jpg
http://www.yohng.com/pvt/trailing.avi

Here is my forum thread, where the question is asked with these examples provided:

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/bbs/t144778.html

I am waiting for Sony to release something 30p and with 25mbps.

Thanks,
George.

I actually decided not to purchase a Canon (though my daughter purchased the HF20). I had purchased it and used it for one day and discovered first of all that the picture was somewhat grainy indoors with normal house lighting even when I used a light, but more importantly I discovered what appears to be an issue for most if not all HD camcorders in this class (perhaps everyone) ... there is no PAUSE function. Every time I hit start and stop, the camera creates another file. So as a videographer (I shoot weddings), if I hit start/stop say 100 times, I'll end up with a 100 little files.

Now if everyone was on Blu-ray and I had no need to stream files online (neither of which is true today), then all these little files would be only a minor annoyance -- dragging and dropping them in the right order into a timeline in a non-linear video editing product. But as my customers want one or two files on a HD or SD card(s) and I post both to my own web sites and to Youtube, I have to merge these files together. Even on a Quad Processor 2.66 Ghz desktop this is very time consuming -- almost as long as it takes me to get video off my HDV tape at 1x playback.

Not sure how I am going to address that issue yet.

In the meantime, I will wait a bit to see what comes out and becomes available in 2010. Right now if I had to buy today, I would lean to the Panasonic HDC-TM300

Joel