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Review of Canon HF100 after vacation

It's a mixed review. The convenience of flash instead of tape is very cool. Battery life with the bigger battery is fine and the 12x zoom is awesome.

Video in bright light is awesome. Video indoors or in darker conditions shows a lot of grain and noise. The reviews before I bought the camera indicated very good night performance but I'm not finding that or maybe I just need to see the normal cameras to get a better expectation for 'good'. Handling wise, it's a little too small. It's hard to take still pictures given where the button is, I guess there is such a thing as too small.

Still photos are disappointing. The pictures look whited out and grainy. We had a Sony DSC-P200 7.2 megapixel camera with us also and it absolutely blows the Canon away for stills. It's not even close.

Bought a Canon HF100 Digital Camcorder

It arrived yesterday then from Amazon. A HF100 camera, 2 x Transcend 16Gb memory cards and the bigger battery. Each 16Gb card gives 2 hours of the highest resolution video. You can specify lower qualities and end up with 9 hours of video at the lowest setting on a 16Gb card. It looks like ANY SDHC card will work so 32Gb should work fine. Battery life with the 918 battery is about 2 hours 40 minutes which is cool. The video quality etc looks very good from the limited use so far. The only complaint would be the handling. It's pretty small and using it one handed is tricky if you want to keep the camera steady and operate zoom and start/stop video. The problem isn't the buttons, it's just small. A second hand to steady it makes a huge difference.

I found out that there is an even bigger battery. The 918 is 1600Ma, the standard one is 900 and the 'big' one is 2700. If the 918 gives 160 minutes of battery then figure the 2700 will add at least an hour. Wish I'd known about the 2700, you can never have enough battery. Charging the battery takes a while, figure 4 hours for the 918 so it's an overnight charge for most people.

Overall so far, very happy with it. I'll be using it at a swim meet next weekend so I'll post more then.