Canon HV10 Camcorder Reviewby David KenderPublished on Sep 19, 2006 4:00 AM 
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Audio (3.75)
Like the Sony HC3 (Review, Specs, $969.99), the Canon HV10 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $814) lacks a microphone jack. As our regular readers surely know, lack of a mic jack really upsets us, especially on a camcorder priced above $1,200. It’s just if you’re investing this much in a high definition camcorder, you obviously care a lot about quality. While pretty pictures in 1080i resolution are all good, if you can’t hear anything very well, the videos are going to be pretty boring. We hit the Sony HC3 pretty hard for not having a mic jack and all our complaints are repeated here – it’s just a stupid engineering move both on Canon and Sony’s parts.
But it gets even better. The Sony HC3, while it didn’t have a mic jack, it has Sony’s proprietary “intelligent” accessory shoe. That’s their shrunk down hot shoe that can only take Sony brand accessories. Along with no mic jack, we put the “intelligent” accessory shoe up there with one of the top things we hate about today’s camcorders. We didn’t think it could be done, but Canon outdid them on the HV10 in category of stupid audio . It has no shoe! Nothing, so, you can’t even take a Canon branded accessory external microphone. This is probably the only time you’re ever going to hear this from this publication, but we actually prefer the “intelligent” accessory shoe over no shoe at all.
The only audio option which the Canon HV10 has is a wind cut feature. The other option we could find is an audio output channel selection, where you can pick which of the channels is output through the audio jacks. You can also adjust the mix between the left and right channels which is output. Finally, like most camcorders you can select whether you want to record your audio in 12 bit or 16 bit. But honestly, with a built in on camera stereo microphone, there isn’t going to be much difference between your left and right channels anyways.
The bottom line for the user picking between the HC3 and the HV10 on an audio front is that they are both total disasters. It’s too bad because Canon could have drawn a really good distinguishing characteristic between themselves and the competition here, but they chose not to. We wonder if the reason they did this was to encourage people to buy the Canon XH A1 (Specs, Recent News, $3279.99), which not only has mic jacks but has XLR jacks and many levels of control. It might have been an effort to push people upwards, but honestly, the A1 is $3,000 more and about 3.5x the price, so it seems unlikely that anyone in the market for the HV10 going to even remotely consider the A1. Instead, it seems Canon is just preventing people from shooting videos with good audio.
VCR Mode (7.0)
The HV10 has a simple VCR mode with all the familiar controls located in the LCD cavity. Unlike many of the other external controls on this camcorder, the VCR buttons are big enough to operate easily (though even these aren’t exactly big.) In VCR mode, the End Search feature can be used to locate the end of the last recorded scene. A few additional playback features are available using the wireless controller: the x2 button plays footage back at twice normal speed, and you also have the option of marking a given point in the time code during either recording or playback mode by pressing the ZERO SET MEMORY button.
In still review mode, photos can be viewed singly by using the +/- buttons (fast forward and rewind in VCR mode) to move from image to image. Images can also be viewed in slide show mode. High-res photos can take several seconds to load on the LCD, and a thumbnails page would speed up the whole process. Calling up the Function menu will also give you options for printing and transferring the photo currently on the LCD. The main menu gives you the ability to perform an operation to the entire series of photos.
Ports (4.0)
The ports and connectivity are pretty disappointing on the HV10. While the camcorder does have an analog AV/IN out jack as well as a Component out jack, it lacks the HDMI jack which the Sony HC3 has. As we mentioned above, it also lacks any real audio jacks such as a microphone jack or a headphone jack. The camcorder does have a DC in jack but doesn’t have a Control-L jack like the HC3 either.
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Ports on the back include USB and DC port (left); on the front, DV/HDV, component-out, and AV-out (right). |
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Normally, ports is a pretty boring section, but in this case the lack of HDMI is a noticeable feature weakness. Because there is no HDMI jack or DVI jack the only want to get playback of HD video off the camcorder in any device other than a camcorder is as an analog signal. To our knowledge there are no non computer devices, other than the one or two HDV decks out there that support HDV over Firewire. This means if you want to hook the HV10 up to your HD TV, or say a Blu-ray burner you’re going to have to do it with an analog signal which will inevitably degrade the picture quality.