Canon DC50 First Impressions Camcorder Reviewby David KenderPublished on Jan 22, 2007 6:00 AM
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Ease of Use
Canon camcorders have been steadily improving over the years to become among the easiest to use on the market. Sony still takes the cake in that department, but Canon is a close second. The major improvements over last year have centered on the handing and menu, so we’ll get to those in a minute. From a strictly ease of use perspective, the DC50 (Review, Specs, $649.99) continues the tradition of intuitive interface and plain-text menu selections.
Handling
The Canon DC50 is almost exactly the same size and weight as last year’s DC40 (Review, Specs, $539.99), so there is little difference in the immediate feel of last years’ model. But a number of small tweaks in body design have made major improvements in handing. The biggest change is the relocation of the joystick from the left side to the rear, allowing for one-handed operation. The only potential flaw here is the small, low-hung hand strap that causes the body to lean left if you’re not stabilizing it with your thumb. It will be hard to do much joystick movement without rocking the body and upsetting your shot. But it’s a big upgrade over last year where you couldn’t even see the joystick without tilting the camcorder towards you.
The other big difference over last year is the menu simplification. No longer are the two buttons leading to the Function menu and administration menu. The admin menu has been folded into the Function which probably gets a lot more use. This has reduced the overall number of buttons.
Two other features, Quick Start and optical image stabilization (OIS), have made a positive impact on handling. The former allows for a start-up time of 0.9 seconds from sleep mode; the latter helps smooth out any image shaking while shooting.
Menu
The menu system, which we already liked in the DC40, has been improved upon in a several meaningful ways. First, as mentioned above, there are no longer two buttons for the Function menu, which contains most of the manual controls, and the “administrative menu,” our own term to classify the menu that contains less frequently used options like OIS on/off, time/date set, and disc finalizing. As the Function menu is surely used more frequently and in order to cut down on buttons, the admin menu is now accessed directly from the Function menu, which is listed as the last item on the list of options that runs down the left side. That list includes (from top to bottom): Mode (standard, aperture priority, or shutter priority), white balance, image effects, digital effects, video quality, still quality, and Main Menu (admin menu).
The administrative menu is now entered through the Function menu
These menus have also received a tiny, but substantial improvement in handling. Formerly, when you got to the bottom of a list of options, you could not simply push the joystick “down” one more time to jump to the top of the list. Instead, you had up push up, up, up… to climb back to the beginning. No more! Now, finally abiding an unwritten, golden rule of usability, it’s much easier to jump around the menu.
The next major improvement is the addition of a second, smaller manual control menu that we might call a “manual control mini-menu.” Looking suspiciously like a feature found on Panasonic camcorders, the mini-menu is accessed by pushing in on the joystick. A small, circular icon appears in the bottom right of the screen. This is page 1 of 3, which you scroll through by more pushing on the joystick. Each page has some control options. Page 1: Quick Playback (plays the last few seconds you recorded), backlight compensation, and video light on/off; page 2: exposure compensation; page 3: focus. This mini-menu is something we’ve always loved in Panasonic camcorders, and we’re glad to see it adopted by others.
LCD and Viewfinder
The Canon DC50 features a 2.7” widescreen LCD with a 123K resolution. The electronic color viewfinder (EVF) is also a 16:9 aspect ratio, which is new this year and offers the same 123K resolution. The EVF cannot pivot or extend outward.
