Canon HV10 Camcorder Review

Still Features (7.5)
The Canon HV10 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $814) has a number of still features to make it a competitor in the hybrid category. It captures stills to MiniSD card, though no card is included. Canon seems to be the only major manufacturer using this card format on a camera or a camcorder, which has few benefits over standard SD other than size. We’d rather that they used the new SDHC (or SD 2.0) cards, which have a much higher capacity and speed.

Stills are saved in the JPEG format at resolutions of 2048 x 1536, 1440 x 1080, 640 x 480, and one widescreen format, 1920 x 1080. Each of these can be saved in one of three qualities, Normal, Fine, and Superfine. Special still features include “drive modes,” which include continuous shooting, high speed continuous shooting, and auto exposure bracketing. This last shooting mode takes three stills consecutively, one at normal exposure, one 1/2EV lower, and one 1/2EV step higher. There is an Auto Focus Assist Lamp that can be turned on and off. The Focus Priority mode can prevent the camcorder from capturing until focus is achieved.

The Canon HV10's still feature include a flash (left) and a MIniSD card slot (right).

Most of the manual and automatic controls that are found in video mode are also available here: auto-slow shutter, adjustable zoom speeds, Instant auto focus and normal auto focus, image stabilization, line markers and grids, and all the white balance, focus, exposure, Scene modes, and image effects. One additional manual control in still mode is the focus method, which can be set to Evaluative, Center Weight, and Spot focus. Finally, there are also Aperture and Shutter Priority modes. The shutter speed range drops down farther than video mode, but does not go as fast: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/15, 1/30, 1/60, 1/100, 1/250, and 1/500. The aperture range is the same as video mode.

There is a flash, located to the right of the lens. The flash cannot be adjusted for strength, but it can be forced on and off, and there is a red-eye reduction feature. This control is made via a button in the LCD cavity, as are the drive modes, auto focus assist lamp on/off, and digital effects on/off.

Still Resolution (12.3)
The Canon HV0’s stills were tested for their resolution by shooting a standard ISO 12233 resolution chart and running those stills through Imatest imaging software. At best, in the 2048 x 1536 resolution, the camcorder produced a resolution of 1238418.75.

This is an excellent resolution score, though as we describe below, good resolution does not a good still make.

Still Performance (4.75)
The Canon HV10 takes stills up to 2048 x 1536, about 3.15MP, though the effective pixel count of the CMOS sensor is only 2.76MP. How do they make the larger image? It happens through a process Canon calls High-Performance Resizing, which is just a fancy way of saying that image is blown up to the look bigger. It is not capturing information beyond its effective pixel count.

Despite a manual white balancing, the color mix is all off. This is not surprising. As we are prone to comment, camcorders are not designed to take great looking still images, even if they take large stills. There are a few exceptions – recently the JVC GZ-MG505 (Review, Specs, $829.95) and Panasonic SDR-S150 (Review, Specs, $699.95) both took great looking stills with excellent color balance. They are the exception, however, and the Canon HV10 is taking the wider, more unfortunate path of the majority. The problem with the colors here is the lack of green - it’s all yellows and blues. We can’t complain about the apparent sharpness of the image; it managed to capture every little detail, and the noise was low.

The Sony HDR-HC3 produced flatter colors, but they did have more balance than the HV10. The stills did not look as good as the HDR-HC3’s video, but they trumped Canon.

The Sony HDR-HC1, the HC3’s predecessor, had the same color balance issues as the Canon HV10, again lacking decent greens.

Overall, the Canon HV10 is not a still camera substitute by any means, nor is it a contender in the hybrid camcorder / camera market.