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From Canon's long history of optical excellence, advanced image processing, superb performance and technological innovation in photographic and broadcast television cameras comes the latest in high definition camcorders.
Now, with the light, compact Canon FS10, you can have stunning video with the ease and numerous benefits of Flash Memory, at an affordable price.
Flash Memory is used in some of the world's most innovative electronic products such as laptop computers, MP3 players, PDAs and cell phones.
Canon offers the best in Flash Memory with Dual Flash Memory- record to both the camcorder's 8GB internal memory and a removable SD/SDHC card, extending your available recording space and offering added flexibility in file transfer and playback.
It's just the thing for catching more of your life's most special moments.
Add to that the FS10's Canon Exclusive features such as Canon 48x Advanced Zoom and DIGIC DV II Image Processor, combined with a 1.07 Megapixel CCD image sensor, Image Stabilization and a 2.7" Widescreen LCD - and you truly have a Flash Memory camcorder that's both hard to beat and unmistakably Canon.
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 Can it get any better ? |
| Review Date: May 14, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Mark A. Garlitz Family's, |
| Upon opening the box, I was amazed by the FS10! It fits in the palm of your hand (about the size of a can of pop) and feels like a finely crafted piece of equipment. I started video taping two minutes later! Let's forgo the technical jargon and skip directly to the picture quality ... amazing! I was video taping in my store and instantly was impressed with how well the camera compensated for light shining through my windows. A quick scan around and I ask myself "how is this thing focusing so quickly?" Focus is instant and accurate. Now for the really cool thing - when out of zoom mode, you can focus on the hair of a fly! Well, I didn't try a fly, but I could literally get within 1/2" of an object and still have instant focus. How do they do it? No having set it for macro focus, it acts like the human eye. OK, how about zooming you ask. Well we had a Comcast guy working on a telephone pole about 200' from my office. I was videoing through my window. The camera still had no problem focusing, and the anti-shake feature of the camera worked incredibly. I've seen other anti-shake cameras and didn't like the digital blurring that occured. The FS10 somehow has eliminated the blurring. I actually zoomed in on the tool belt of the Comcast guy and could read the brand name! No exaggeration. OK, now for the real test ... transferring the video to my computer. Previously, I hooked my audio/video cables up to my video capture card and then went through a long process of capturing and then coverting and then putting the video on dvd. With the FS10, I loaded the software, plugged in the usb cable, selected my video from a thumbnail explorer type of program, and 1 minute later was watching my video with Windows media player. The file is MPEG straight out of the camcorder! REMEMBER, this camcorder has no tape, so all you are really doing is transferring a file from the camcorder to your harddrive. Burning a DVD from there is a no brainer. What else? Well, no moving parts to wear out. Yea, you do have a zoom, but that's about it. I did think the zoom button had a cheap feel, but not bad. One last thing. I videoed in a dimmly lit room last night. The picture was grainy. Not real impressed with that, but maybe there is a setting for low light. I did turn on the video light and that helped a great deal. Canon uses an LED light - so minimal battery consumption when using the light. All in all, very impressive! |
Totally Satisfactory for My Needs
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| Review Date: August 7, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Alan E. Cook, Shoals, IN USA |
I bought this as a replacement for my Sony MiniDV camcorder. The video quality is roughly the same using the default settings. However, because I can adjust many more settings on this, I end up shooting better video than I could have with the Sony.
I also like the smaller size (you have to see this to believe it) and the flash memory (no moving parts equals faster response and longer battery life).
I mostly use the camcorder for filming my kids and then uploading it for my parents to watch (they live overseas). It's perfect for that. I download the video to my MacBook Pro, edit in iMovie 08, and then publish to my MobileMe Gallery. It's a very fast and easy process.
Oh, and finally, I loved the price! All this for only $385.00.
I've owned this camcorder for 6 weeks and taken quite a few hours of video and so far can't think of anything I don't like about it. |
Best basic home movie camcorder out there today
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| Review Date: November 20, 2008 |
| Reviewer: Karl R. Schultz, |
I get abused by my wife for over-analyzing every purchase, but after playing around with this camera a little, I've earned a stay of execution. The camera is amazingly small and light. The low-light performance is on par with this class of camcorder (none are great) but I found tweaking the settings a little make the noise much less noticeable. The battery life is between 2-3 hours and it charges fairly quickly. I prefer the optical anti-shake of higher end camcorders, but it looks like Canon has the digital version working pretty well now. The "auto-shutter" to protect the lens is really nice since my past camcorders always had finger smudges regardless of how often I cleaned the lens and kept the cap on.
The functions are fairly intuitive and I only needed the manual to figure out I had to push the photo button down a littler further to actually take a picture. It definitely isn't going to replace my real camera for photos and it'll be used 99% of the time for video only, but the photo quality was good enough to work in a pinch.
As usual, throw away the provided software and use the movie editing software on your computer. For me, that meant iMovie 08 for the Mac. There's some nuances with iMovie and this camera, but if you turn off Time Machine and set the camera USB port to always connect to "PC" (not sure why it doesn't default to this anyway), you shouldn't have any issues. iMovie 08 is the only Mac software that recognizes the camera without requiring additional software (ugh - not the fault of the camera though).
The only difference between the FS100, FS10, and FS11 is the amount of internal flash. With the battery life and the availability of an SD/SDHC slot capable of supporting up to 32Gb cards, the FS10 looked like the "sweet spot" of the 3 versions with the best balance of price and memory.
If I really needed a view finder, hot shoe, great low-light performance, HD video, etc... I would've just bought a much more expensive camera. For what this camera is designed to do, you can't go wrong. |
It works with a mac!
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| Review Date: October 4, 2008 |
| Reviewer: lee bee, |
It works with my macbook! I was a little concerned when I first tried to install the software. I did not think it was going to work. iMovie recognized the files straight from the camera though.
1) Plug the camera into the electrical socket
2) Make the camera switch set to "play video"
3) Choose the "printer/PC" option on the camera's screen
4) Launch iMovie, it recognizes the camera!
I did not end up even needing to install the software it came with. (ImageMixer 3 SE or the Digital Video Solution Disk Ver.30.0)
I realize this isn't really a review about the camera itself, but I was stumped for a few minutes on how to use the software on my mac... which it turns out I did not need to.
The camera itself seems to be working great so far .... but I only just got it today. Clear picture and audio. So far so good. |
Little Camcorder with Big Features
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| Review Date: December 26, 2008 |
| Reviewer: robotnut, Cranford, NJ |
This is simply an awesome camcorder. It is extremely small and lightweight making it easy to take along anywhere. I love the fact that it uses reusable SD flash cards so there are no tapes or dvds to buy. And with the 8GB internal memory, you can start using this camcorder right out of the box even if you don't have any SD cards. By the way, it is compatible with SD and SDHC cards. I don't have any SDHC cards yet but I used a Kingston 2GB microSD card (with adaptor) and it works great.
It has an Easy Mode which simplifies the camcorder's functions so that virtually anyone can use it. For more advanced users, it allows you to manually adjust settings such as shutter speed and aperture. You can even override the autofocus and manually adjust the focus. It's got a few built-in special effect filters such as black and white, sepia, mosaic, and art. The camcorder can also take digital still photos, although the resolution is only about 1MP. But the great thing is that the 48x zoom and widescreen features work when taking still photos as well as videos. Those are things my digital still camera can't do. Also, you can get extremely close to your subject with this camcorder as the minimum focusing distance is a mere 1cm. This being my first digital camcorder, I had no previous experience, but in less than a day I was importing video clips to my computer and editing my own movies! I now have a flood of movie ideas that I want to do with this camcorder.
This camcorder saves photos in .jpg format so there's no compatability issues there. Video files are a bit trickier. It saves videos in .mod format. Each video will also have a second file with a .moi extension. This file contains the date/time info as well as the aspect ratio info. I had problems when trying to play the .mod file in Windows Media Player. The audio plays fine, but the video shows up as just a bunch of squiggly horizontal lines. I even tried renaming the extension to .avi and .mpg as some people have suggested but that didn't work for me. I was able to import the .mod files into Windows Movie Maker (WMM) but videos I took in 16:9 format were all squashed into 4:3 format. This occurs even when I set the WMM option to display in 16:9 ratio. Apparently, this is because the aspect ratio information is stored in that .moi file rather than in the video file itself and so WMM is unable to detect that it's widescreen. To get around these issues, I installed the Pixela ImageMixer 3 software that came with the camcorder. With this software, I can convert the videos from .mod to .mpg format. After the conversion, the videos play fine in Windows Media Player and the widescreen format is correctly recognized by WMM.
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