Canon HF S10

Canon Vixia HF S10

The HF S10 camcorder offers sharp and vibrant video and stills, and its truly robust manual controls make it a great choice for dedicated users. Hands down, the Canon Vixia HF S10 generates the best high-definition video and still images we've seen from a small camcorder. Add the impressively deep and professional manual controls, and you have an excellent--albeit expensive ($1300 as of 9/25/09)--camera for advanced videographers that will also appeal to many casual users. The camera's 1/2.6-inch CMOS imaging chip records 1080 horizontal lines of video at 60 interlaced frames per second (60i), 30 progressive frames per second (30p), and 24 progressive frames per second (24p). The camera includes 32GB of built-in flash memory and supports SDHC cards, and it encodes the video as AVCHD files with data rates up to 24 mbps, the format's maximum capability. In PC World's subjective evaluations, viewers judged the HF S10's HD video and 8.6-megapixel still images to be slightly better than those of the next-best camcorder (the Panasonic HDC-TM300). Among our test group of six new high-definition camcorders, the Vixia HF S10 ranked at the top in video quality under both bright lighting and low lighting, earning an overall video-quality score of Good.