Jonathan Davies

It may have taken a bit longer than expected to get out But hopefully it was worth the wait.

I’ve had the Canon HV30 for a couple of weeks now and I think I’m ready to finalize my thoughts on it. I’ve decided to go with a reviewing style that I like a lot, similar to Paul Stamatiou by dividing it up into different portions. Just as a disclaimer: this is the first camcorder I have ever owned, so don’t be surprised if a couple of things I find very useful are commodities on most video cameras.

Build

The HV30 on the whole has a very strong build quality, it doesn’t feel flimsy and feels solid in your hand. Of course it should considering it is a $1000 camcorder. However the tape housing does feel a bit loose and you can feel it jiggle around quite a lot. One other slight annoyance is that the cover for the hot-shoe is attached to the body and kinda’ gets in the way of my Rode Video Mic. I would prefer it to be totally removable but I understand why it is there.

The controls are nicely situated so that they are easily accessible with one hand. They have also improved the zoom control, making it larger. If you weren’t aware the HV30 features a large 2.7″ screen that even in the sunlight isn’t blemished. Instead of having a silver finish, in is now black; which in my opinion looks a lot better and makes it seem a lot more professional.

All in all I thing that the HV30 is a very well built camcorder, though it has a couple of design flaws that might annoy some.

Specifications and Quality

The HV30 records up to 1080i high definition onto standard DV tapes. It has a standard HD shooting mode, but also has a 30P mode and a 24P mode (which I have yet to delve into). You can of course shoot good old regular standard definition. And as I learnt. If you want to use it to stream live on Ustream.tv it needs to be on that mode.

You can, as with most video cameras you can take stills, but if your looking for anything with quality then you probably want to look at a point and shoot which will be leaps and bounds over what this camera can produce. If you want to take still photos then you will need to get a micro SD card to put in the camera.

As for quality. It looks good, very good. There is something about it that makes it look clean, just how clear the footage is makes it look good. The following link goes to a piece of test footage that I shot outside. It’s at 720p so it looks pretty good. I think that any camera at this price is going to reach a limit where the video really can’t get that much better until you have a much larger budget.

Usage

Filming with the HV30 is very easy and controlling it is even more so. The interface is very easy to use and to understand so the use of the instruction book was not needed at all. Though you did have to dig quite deep to change some of the settings and when trying to change the quality of the video it didn’t have a clear guide to what I was actually changing.

One nice feature that I liked was the ability to change the time it takes to zoom in and out by just slightly pushing it or pushing it all the way.

One thing that I was very surprised about was the I didn’t really need any extra lighting when filming indoors, I thought I would. The HV30 has above average from the sound of things, low light performance that I was impressed by. Some said that I would be limited while using DV Tapes which the HV30 records onto. Personally, I have found them very easy to use and to work with. My only slight annoyance has been finding thing the right spot to set Final Cut Express to capture the footage. Though it’s very comforting to know that you have all your footage stored away on DV Tape.

Conclusions

I am very happy with the HV30, it really is the sweet stop for consumer cameras. It offers good performance for a good price.

However, I’m not sure if the HV30 is necessarily that much better than the HV20. But looking at Amazon, currently the prices of both are pretty comparable so the choice is up to you. If you want to produce video for the web then this really is your best option. You get very high quality video that can be noticed and frankly you’re not going to see much difference between this and a few thousand dollar camera on the web.

Any thoughts?

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