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The Canon ZR45MC has an MSRP of $799 and a street price around $600. It's effectively the Canon ZR40 but with added still capability. Although there are similarly price camcorders with better still capability, the manual control this camcorder offers makes it a good choice for those who are serious about their video but on a tight budget.

The Canon MiniDV ZR45MC has a 2.5 in. LCD and a color viewfinder. The camcorder has an 18x optical 360x digital zoom. The optical zoom is nice, but I would never recommend shooting with the digital zoom because it degrades the picture quality too much. The ZR45MC has IEEE 1394 Firewire in and out port for transferring your videos to and from your computer and camcorder plus analog in and outs. The camcorder has a 1/8 in. microphone in jack plus a similar headphone jack for monitoring sound. The ZR45MC has a 460K pixel 1/6 in. CCD with 290K effective pixels. The ZR45MC can record in both SP and LP mode, but the LP mode has been reported to be unreliable so I wouldn't recommend using it.

The camcorder has auto focus that is controlled by a dial which is somewhat hard to use. I would rather the focus be controlled by a focus ring around the lens but the other manual controls make up for this problem. The camcorder lets you control both shutter speed and white balance manually through the menu system. The minimum shutter speed of the camcorder is 1/8000th of a second and the maximum is 1/60th of a second. The white balance can be set manually, put in indoor, outdoor or full auto mode. The camcorder also has multiple pre-programmed auto exposure modes if you prefer that the camcorder takes the wheel.

The ZR45MC has a SD Memory Card slot for saving digital stills onto. The camcorder comes with an 8MB SD card which can hold 60 fine quality stills or 105 standard quality stills. The camcorder can save stills at a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. The camcorder has a USB port for transferring the digital stills from the camcorder to the computer.

Although the still performance of the ZR45MC is fine, there are camcorders made by other manufacturers that are similarly price with more features including saving of MPEG video by Sony and higher resolution stills with Panasonic. If still performance is very important to you I would recommend staying away from the model. However if you are looking for a lot of manual control so you can get a great picture the ZR45MC is a great choice. If you combine the manual control, the satisfactory still performance and the low price this is a great camcorder for the consumer who is serious about shooting good video.