Canon HF10 First Impressions Camcorder Reviewby Alfredo PadillaPublished on Jan 15, 2008 4:00 PM 
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Audio
The Canon Vixia HF10 has a two-channel stereo electret microphone that is mounted just beneath the lens. On the back you will find a mic jack and next to it the A/V out that doubles as a headphone jack. We like the placement of the mic and headphone ports at the back of the camcorder better than the placement at the front with the HG10 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $1299.99) as this allows you to better manage your wires. When using a wired headset you’ll also want to change the headphone mode in the menu before you plug in to avoid some nasty feedback noise. Like the HG10 the Canon Vixia HF10 also sports a winds screen feature, audio level controls and a zoom mic to better pick up sound for the place you want it.
Playback
Like many other software features on the Canon Vixia HF10 learning how to deal with playback mode can be confusing. It’s easy enough to enter playback mode, just move the switch on the back right of the camcorder to Playback mode. You then get a screen with thumbnails of your clips that can be navigated using the joystick. The Function button will bring up a menu with options like Add to Playlist, Delete, Select Date, and Menu.
When you actually start playing a clip is when things start to go a little weird. You can use the playback buttons below the LCD for Play/Pause, Fast Forward, Rewind, and Stop. The Fast Forward and Rewind are very sensitive, however, and you can quickly get up to the 60x max speed and find you’ve gone through the entire clip. The joystick can also be used to control playback, but also has some issues. Left/Right on the joystick will skip between clips. Up/Down doesn’t do anything until you press in on the joystick to bring up a menu where up/down controls volume. Of course you would expect left/right to do something special and different now, right? Unfortunately not, which brings up the question: why not assign volume to up/down by default and do away with the extraneous menu? You can bring up the Administrative menu during playback by hitting the Function menu button to get to system settings like display setup and date/time.
Connectivity
Probably the biggest issue for connectivity with the Canon Vixia HF10 is that the accessory shoe has been transitioned to the new Mini Advanced Shoe standard. On the plus side the cover for the Shoe is now tethered to the body so you won’t lose it as easily, but if we give that up can we please have our standard shoe back, sirs? The practical impact of this change is that none of your previous Canon accessories will work with the HF10. On top of that, the standard is new enough that you won’t find many accessories that will work with it, nor are there adaptors to use accessories that require a standard shoe. In time, we expect some third party to develop a hack, but anything like that will likely put a lot of pressure on the gripping area of the shoe and risk snapping it off.
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In the LCD cavity, you'll find an SDHC card slot and component-out (left); |
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That disappointment aside, the Canon Vixia HF10 provides users with a decent selection of ports and most of them are well located. As we mentioned above the mic and headphone/AV-out jacks have been moved to the back of the camcorder as opposed to the front as on the HG10. Below these ports you will find the DC-in and to the right the battery slot. On the right side of the HF10 are the mini HDMI and USB ports. We have to again express some annoyance at the use of “Mini” version of HDMI as this will require you to go out and get yet another cable. Inside the LCD cavity is the SDHC card slot. We like that most of the ports are located on the back or the left of the camcorder as this means you won’t have wires obscuring your view of the LCD.