The Student Filmmaker's Buying Guide To Consumer Camcorders

Canon HF S21

First on our list is Canon's newly minted HF S21, which will be hitting the shelves sometime next month (April 2010). The HF S21 is one of the more expensive consumer camcorders on the market (its list price is $1399), but it is still a whole lot cheaper than any professional or prosumer camcorder out there. The HF S21 produced some of the sharpest, most detailed images out of the high-end consumer camcorders we tested this year. The camcorder can record to its 64GB of internal flash memory in addition to its dual SD/SDHC/SDXC memory card slots. Click here to read our full review of the Canon HF S21.

The control dial is excellent for making precise adjustments.

One of our favorite features of the Canon HF S21 is its front-mounted control dial that can be used to adjust focus, exposure, shutter speed, aperture, gain, or audio levels. You'll probably notice most of the models listed in this article have some sort of control dial or lens ring, but we feel that the HF S21 has the best setup overall. The dial rotates with the perfect amount of friction, and a button located on its front allows you to choose what manual control you are adjusting without having to go through any menus.

Aperture and shutter speed cannot be set independently on the HF S21, which is a bit of a downer. Both can only be adjusted manually in priority control modes. Gain is also not fully adjustable, with the camcorder instead allowing you to set the auto gain control limit anywhere between 0dB and 24dB. Canon has a few color controls on the HF S21, but the range of adjustment available isn't very strong. Still, the HF S21 is one of the few consumer camcorders that offers control over things like contrast, sharpness, and color depth. Read more about the manual controls on the HF S21 here.

The right side of the camcorder has a slightly uncomfortable design.

We feel the size of the HF S21 should appeal to student filmmakers. Compared to most consumer camcorders, the HF S21 is not a small product, and its bulky design should give you a bit of professional authority when you whip it out for an interview or shooting session. Our only complaint is that the camcorder didn't feel all that comfortable in our palm due to its boxy right-side design. Still, if you're shooting on a tripod most of the time this won't be an issue.

Other benefits of the Canon HF S21 include its electronic viewfinder, a 3.5-inch LCD, external mic and headphone jacks, and a Canon-proprietary accessory shoe. The camcorder also features a LANC terminal, which can be used to connect a wired remote control—often found on professional tripods or other recording equipment. The Canon HF S21 is also the first non-tape camcorder to offer a native 24p record mode. In addition to this native record mode, the camcorder also offers its PF30 and PF24 modes, which offer the look of 24p and 30p while not actually saving the videos in those frame rates natively.

The HF S21 is one of the few consumer camcorders to include a viewfinder.

There are a few downsides to the HF S21 as well. Its accessory shoe only works with Canon products due to its proprietary design. So, if you have a favorite video light or shotgun mic that's not made by Canon, you'll have to purchase a third-party adapter for them to work with the accessory shoe on the HF S21. The camcorder's optical image stabilization wasn't the best we've ever seen, but it still did a decent job (and it has lots of different settings). The 3.5mm external mic jack is left uncovered by Canon, which we see as a big no-no. We expect lots of student filmmakers to just toss their camcorders into a bag when they're in a hurry, and an unprotected port can easily be harmed in this type of situation.

The HF S21 is part of a series from Canon that also includes the HF S20 and HF S200. The HF S21 is the only camcorder in this series to include an electronic viewfinder, but the only other differences between the three camcorders is price and internal memory (the HF S20 has 32GB of internal memory and the HF S200 records to memory cards only). Read our full review of the HF S21 here.