Customer Reviews

Canon FS10 Flash Memory Camcorder with 8GB Internal Flash Memory and 48x Advanced Zoom

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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!

First of all let me state that i spent 2 weeks researching camcorders before buying this one. Many mixed reviews on many different sites.

What sold me on it was the fact that there's no tapes, dvd's, or other moving mechanisms to wear out, other than the zoom. No moving parts means batteries last longer. The mic input was a big plus as well as being compact.

Upon arrival i was amazed at the size and weight. After trying it out there were a few downsides that could be fixed.
1.The biggy for me was no lens threads for adding filters for effects or for keeping mist and dust off the lens while shooting. I found a few universal lens adapters but the were too bulky for the cameras small frame. I decided to try something. The barrel of the lens measured at 34mm so i found a 34mm to 37mm silver metal step up ring on ebay for $2. Now i used hot glue on the threads of the step ring and quickly placed it into cameras the barrel. Fit perfectly and looks as if it was always there and if i want to remove it, why, who knows, the glue will just peel off the inside of the barrel leaving no marks. Now i can attach uv filters, wide angle lenses...etc.
2. No hot shoe. Ebay once again...found a cold shoe handle that attaches to the camera and gives me a place to attach a led spotlight and an external mic...cost-under $15
3. $80 for a replacement battery?!? You gotta like China. You can get exact knockoffs that work just as good as the original with a wall charger for $15 - ebay
4. Kind of grainy in low light. First of all it's not a night vision camera so you should have some sort of light source to begin with. Even in Hollywood they use lighting. Think people before you complain! Attached a led spotlight and it does the trick for me.
5. Saves as an .mod file but pc or editor won't recognize it. There's a free program called sdcopy that converts the files to usable/editable files in seconds.

Outdoor video is awesome! Bright, crisp colors. Indoor is great as well with the right lighting. This camera is great! Battery life is incredible! I fit 2 hours of footage in the highest quality filming mode on a 4 gig card. Footage is easy to edit and looks great on dvd. I highly recommend it! The only reason i didn't give it a perfect score was i had to invent a lens adapter...but it can be done quick and easy!

I like the size of the camera, fits nicely in my hand. The basic controls are easy to find and use. The LCD panel is bright and easy to see on a sunny day. The battery seems to have a reasonably long charge, I used it for about an hour straight last night on a fresh charge on new batteries and it still had power to go. The flash memory means no moving parts except for the lens. Also its fast to start and shutdown. I like being able to have some removable media - the removable SD card. It uses a USB connection to the computer, which is ok. THE BAD IS.. the movies are saved natively in a unique file format forcing you to use the "imagemixer" bundled software to download to the computer. Once you successfully do this, then try to load these files (mpg) into MS MovieMaker you get a green screen for previews! I've got a support request in for this problem. No resolution yet. It did come bundled with it's own movie editor, but for those of us who are used to MS Moviemaker this is a problem. BTW the mpgs play nicely in the MS Media Player, it just MS MovieMaker that has the problem.

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.

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 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.

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.

I did lots of research, and am happy I chose this one. I got this for my wife for Christmas08, so we have lots of experience with it now to review. I also realize there are newer options on the market now to consider before you make your purchase. If your expectations are for perfection in video, then buy something costing three to five times more. For my needs and expectations as a sophisticated hobbyist, the FS10/FS11/FS100 is exactly perfect price vs performance ratio.

If you are going digital, why would you buy a camera with a hard drive (HDD) or a mini-DVD burner on board? A HUGE point of failure and battery suck. In my opinion, with the low-cost SDHC (SD HighCapacity), this solid-state camera technology is the ONLY way to go. Before you buy HDD/Mini-DV, see what steps and time you have to go through to get video on your computer, edit it, and burn a DVD. Makes some other reviewer complaints on this camera pale.

FS10 FS11 and the FS100 are identical except they have different amounts of memory. To me the FS10 is the sweetspot. Enough onboard memory to be functional, then copy over to the SDHC for redundancy (corruption happens) and to quickly pop into a cardreader on my computer. OR use multiple SDHC's for high capacity or redundancy til you download to your computer or make your DVD. Show me someone who is committed to ALWAYS having data in two places, and I will show you someone who has felt the pain of lost data (damaged/corrupted SDHC/hard-drive-crash, motherboard failure, etc).

My wife and I do not have an HD TV to view High Def on, and the files are HUGE. I will start looking at HD in another 5 years. No Hurry. I've got a great looking Panasonic TV that has lots more years in it. So, for what we want this Canon FS10 is ideal.

My wife likes her camera, so it was a great gift. I have used it too, and I really like it. The coup de gras was at my brother-in-law's retirement-party and wedding where I shot lots of footage. I burned a bunch of DVD's for folks to take home with them, from the raw footage on the camera straight to the DW-100 stand alone burner. The footage looked GREAT when we viewed it on TV and a standard DVD player. Received lots of unsolicited positive compliments about the appearance of the recordings. Said it looked semi-professional.

NOTE: I was using the highest-quality setting, NOT the default setting it comes out of the box with. The highest quality setting makes a little larger file, which consumes your memory a little faster, but the result IS WORTH IT, if you are shooting archival footage. For just average video or to throw something up on Youtube, the lowest quality smallest-filesize setting will work fine. You probably don't even need the middle quality setting.

MUCH of our wedding recording was shot in pretty low light (think the inside of a dimly lit church). I can only assume that the persons posting problems shooting in low light either 1)have different settings on their camera (I am using the EASY BUTTON!) or 2) The got a lemon of a camera, or 3) they have unreasonable expectations of how low light that they can/should shoot video under.

I saw that the image on the flip-out screen while I was recording, did look grainy, and showed a lot of shake while I was recording. BUT the processed image did not show as much grain in low light, or as much shake, when replayed on the big screen tv. It even kept the wide-screen format of the camera recording when viewing on tv, as black bars were present above and below the image on the tv screen.

Connection to my wife's Mac is simple, as long as you have iMovie 08 or newer (09). See more here: [...] The only reason to put it in iMovie is to edit. If you don't need to edit in or edit out portions within scenes or sounds, or don't want to make the time or hassle to edit, just burn straight to DW-100 stand alone burner. Haven't tried downloading videos directly to my pc laptop.

My only complaint about the DW-100 stand alone burner is that it is MUCH larger than I expected, and I believe MUCH larger than it needed to be. The camera is so tiny, I expected the DW-100 stand alone burner to be small also. Don't expect the DW-100 stand alone burner to fit in your other pocket. But if you simply use an inexpensive Power Inverter in your car, you can take videos in remote locations, and send DVD's home with all your friends/family after events like concerts, plays, weddings, family reunions...etc. Logically, instead of considering a video recorder that makes on-board DVD's (actually mini-DVD's), the DW-100 stand alone burner is a MUCH more functional, convenient, and elegant solution. The on-board models suck MUCH more battery life, are prone to failure due to many more moving parts, and by necessity must be much larger/bulkier.

The grainy-ness and camera shake looked bad on the screen as I shot video. But looked great after on DVD. I have not seen the types of poor video complaints of some other reviewers. I wonder if some reviewers are seeing compression artifacts of repeated recompression of editing? Don't know what they are using. I use iMovie 08, so far, so good.

I recommend using two hands to help stabilize...I mean the left hand/fingers grasping the viewscreen, especially at max zoom. The intelligent anti-shake can only do so much. The camera is so tiny that it WILL move with every movement of your shaky hand. It does not have the bulk and mass of a big VHS camcorder to stabilize it. Remember the tiny size and weight are a feature, and if that feature appeals to you, you must be mindful to hold it steady when shooting. I think a uni-pod (like a hiking staff, smaller/lighter than a tripod) is ideal.

*Tiny size, fits in my palm, and in my front pants pocket. Amazing.
*Fast-on, and EASY BUTTON are convenient.
*Battery life is excellent.
*The DW-100 stand alone burner is not cheap, but it is a really nice and convenient guilty pleasure (although bigger than wanted/necessary). Think of it like this: It's like buying a miniDV video camera with the DVD-writer portion separate, which gives you greater camera battery life, lets you use cheap standard widely-available DVD-R (compared to expensive and fewer-minutes on miniDV), fewer moving parts in the camera to break, tremendous reliability against disc-write errors due to jarring or drops.
*Make SURE if you use the DW-100 stand alone burner for recording, that your DVD-R's are VERBATIM brand for greatest reliability.
*I expect long-life and reliability because there are so few moving parts (no hard-drive HDD, no miniDV burner, just a zoom lens).
*The stabilization feature worked well (just don't expect miracles).
*The lowest-light shots were a touch grainy but not nearly as bad as expected after reading some bad reviews (again I used the highest quality setting, and Easy Button). The focus was sometimes in/out when in low light and extreme zoom. If you need NO GRAIN, and PERFECT FOCUS, get a big light, or spend a LOT more on a different camera.
*Mac compatible for simple/easy editing in iMovie 08 or newer.
*Uses standard removable media SDHC (why would you buy one that didn't? OR that had only built-in and none removable?).
*I don't know about still-photos. Didn't buy it for that. But I imagine it would work in a pinch...hey, most folks use the camera on their cell phone for crying-out-loud.
*Dual memory: Onboard memory plus SDHC. Redundancy to guard against data loss, unlimited capacity using removable SDHC, and quick/easy download to computer using card-readers(at least on a Mac via iMovie 08 or later).
*Excellent zoom.
*Do make SURE any SDHC card you buy has a speed class 2 or higher. If you can not confirm that specification, keep looking. The manual also recommends to stick with Sandisk, Panasonic, or Toshiba brand cards.
*Make SURE any card reader you intend to use to read SDHC cards directly to your computer (as as a fast and convenient option/alternative to the usb connection) are specifically able to read the HighCapicity version (SDHC vs SD). Good SDHC card readers are available for [...] dollars.

I've already gone on very long. I will post a comment that has LOTS of additional information gleaned from snippets that hundreds of other reviewers have posted. I hope you find it helpful.

First off I have to give a big thank you to Amazon for saving me over 400 dollars on the Cannon FS10. My camera was ordered on a Tuesday at 4pm and I recieved it on Wed before 3pm! Wow! I thought with standard shipping I wouldnt get this little gem for a while. Not the case. It is a small camera! I know everyone says that but you dont get it, its tiny! I mean Red Bull can size. Nice... I have to say its a very user friendly camera with some neat and simple features. Dont let the manual syke you out. I am one of those people who likes to figure out electronics without the manual to see what I can come up with. But this presented me with NO challenges. The LCD screen is nice and big and its a really comfortable camera to hold and shoot with. The onle reason I didnt give it a 5 star rating was simple. The software stinks! But if your going to do basic editing then its perfect. If you want nicely edited pieces then I suggest forking out a few hundred extra for something like Adobe Premier CS3, which is amazing! For your family needs it the best buy. And saving from anywhere from 2 to 4 hundred dollars buying it from Amazon is brilliant. I researched and even tried through renting every sony and cannon out there. Even went as far as JVC and Samsung. Nothing and I mean nothing compares to this. Everyone wants the perfect camcorder. This is as close as it gets for the cash. Meaning the next step would be the XL1 by cannon which will set you back the price of a small car. So bang for the buck? Yep. Software? nope. Amazing quality? Yep. Should you buy this if you cant decide on a cannon or sony? Yep! The last thing I will say thats sort of negative is that the night time shooting is a bit dark. now if your an average person looking to make home movies or youtube stuff then you have no need to worry. If your making short films or docs then get yourself the proper accessories such as mics, lights and editing software. Its sooo nice! Love it!

We used this camera for our wedding and it worked out beautifully. We just passed it around to whomever was interested in taping for a while. No one had any problems figuring out how to use it, and it had enough internal memory to capture the whole day. Only complaint would be the battery life. The battery life indicator is a little mis-leading, as it goes from 2 hours left down to 10 minutes left in about 40 minutes. Overall, this is a great product.