Canon HV20 HDV Camcorder Reviewby John NeelyPublished on Mar 26, 2007 5:00 PM 
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Still Features (9.25)
Canon goes to great lengths to link their camcorders to the company’s deserved excellence in still photography. Like most Canons, the HV20 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $903) does feature some impressive still photo options, as well as decent still resolution. Yet no camcorder, including Canon’s top consumer HDV cam, are true hybrid standouts. For the foreseeable future, you are still be better off with a $200 digital still camera than a single “hybrid” but the HV20 does well for what it is. Still photo resolution can be set to 2048 x 1536 (4:3), 1920 x 1080 (16:9), 1440 x 1080 (4:3), or 640 x 480 (4:3) in memory mode, and each of these can be set to a quality of Normal, Fine, and Superfine. In addition, stills can be captured during playback or recording at the current video resolution. During 16:9 DV playback or recording, stills are captured at 848 x 480.
To capture stills at the highest available resolution, you’ll first need to move the recording mode switch from “tape” to “card.” Photos are saved to Mini SD cards, which load in the hatch-protected slot in the LCD cavity. A brief note here: many camcorders place their card slots in the LCD cavity without a slot cover of any kind, and that design does make card release more convenient than on the HV20. The slot’s location near the base of the cavity and adjacent to the LCD screen also makes access to the card tricky, especially when the camcorder is tripod-mounted. It’s not a killer in terms of usability, but it could be better.
As in video mode, there are two menus: Function and main. The Function menu contains options for scene modes, white balance, image effects, video light on/off, digital effects, MPEG-2 (low quality) video recording, and still resolution and quality. All the options in these items are the same as in video mode.
The main menu, or administrative menu, has some of the more interesting and useful features, and those that should have been included in the Function menu. Shutter speed control is here, which can be set to Auto, 1/60, 1/100, and 1/250. The auto focus method is also here, which has options for Artificial Intelligent Auto Focus (AiAF), Center weighted, and auto focus off. Unlike in Canon’s still cameras, the AiAF cannot be set to 9-point, 5-point, and 3-point. The detection is completely automatic, looking for the areas with clearest contrast, then automatically honing in on them, and snapping the picture.
The HV20 also allows you to record stills while in video mode, even while simultaneously recording video to the tape. In this mode, the still resolution maxes out at a meager 640 x 480.
Still Performance (6.1)
The Canon HV20’s still photos were tested by shooting a Gretag McBeth Color Checker chart and running those stills through Imatest imaging software. We found the best possible image to be produced by reducing the exposure compensation scale to -1. This scale does not indicate the exact increment, but reading the EXIF data, it appears to be a reduction of -0.25EV. At this setting, the color error was 9.77, with 1.3% noise. The image was oversaturated by 19.4%. Noise actually decreased by leaving the exposure compensation untouched, but the color error increased by a larger margin.
All of the scores indicate a higher color error than is normal in a point-and-shoot camera. Most of the spectrum remained very accurate, but the blue channel shifted very far into oversaturation, pushing the mean color error. Manufacturers will often bump up the blues to make the sky look better in photos. However, you’ll often see an accompanying boost in the skin tone range, which we did not see here to anywhere near the same degree.
Still Resolution (26.6)
The Canon HV20’s stills were tested for their resolution by shooting an Applied Image ISO 12233 resolution chart and running those stills through Imatest imaging software. Resolution is measured in line widths per picture height (lw/ph). The camcorder proved to have a strong tendency towards underexposing the blacks, even in bright, even illumination. This can produce a “clipping” error in Imatest. In order to combat the problem, we bumped the exposure compensation up as far as +1.25EV. This managed to get the clipping percentage down to 0.9%. At this setting, the camcorder produced a horizontal resolution of 1412 lw/ph, and a vertical resolution of 1318 lw/ph. The image was oversharpened by a relatively small degree at this setting, only 2.72%.