Canon FS100 Flash Memory Camcorder with 48x Advanced Zoom (Silver)

This is a long review because I took a lot of time in researching the camcorder I wanted, so I think my knowledge and use of this thing should be beneficial to SOMEONE out there. I had my eye on this thing before it was out, and saw reviews from some lucky people who got their hands on it before its release. Once I was able to order, Amazon shipped it in a not very well packaged box, but everything worked. It comes with a little remote, by the way, which came in handy when I connected the camcorder to our TV.

Preface: I am an intermediate video editor. I use Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, sadly not CS3, and I easily figure out menus of electronics without needing to read manuals. So with that said, this camcorder was perfect for me. For beginners, it is still easy to use, but the more advanced features take some button pushing to access. Still, the basics are out in the open.

(By the way, I purchased the sapphire blue and it's more pretty in person than in the photos.)

I researched for a long while online, and after using the in-laws' Panasonic DV, I knew what I really, really wanted right now in a camcorder.

These were my requirements that I wouldn't budge on:

Small and Lightweight

Microphone input

Less than $500

Records to Flash Memory (Card)

As-close-to-great quality footage

These were optional:

High Definition

Cold/Hot Shoe Attachment

Ability to add other lenses

Digital Camera

So, the FS100 is compact. I knew it would be small, but I had no idea that the whole thing could sit in my hand. It also fits in my purse (and my purse isn't a huge "hobo" bag that many girls carry around these days). Because there are no "moving parts" and everything is recorded to a little memory card (SD), the camcorder is also very light and quiet. If it's still not quiet enough for you because you're in an extremely quiet surrounding, use an external mic.

I required an input for a microphone because, in the future, I'll want better sound for commercial purposes. Especially for when I want to upload my videos to the internet for promotional advertising (or perhaps Amazon reviews?). Or maybe for recording footage of my first child's birth curses and all. ;D This is one of the very few "consumer" camcorders that allows mic-in.

DV is said to still be of great quality, but SD memory cards are just too cheap and reusable to pass up nowadays. Unless you're a pro editing video for professional purposes, your end-user isn't going to notice the difference between DV and flash memory. Memory cards are also lighter, smaller, and quiet. They make it easier to actually get my footage onto a disc, or stored on a NAS (Network Attached Storage) so that I don't have a stack of unlabeled DV tapes that haven't been watched since they were recorded.

Because the FS100 uses flash memory, recordings are stored as separate digital clips. Do you know what this means? This means my footage WON'T GET RECORDED OVER. You don't know how many times this has happened to me because someone picks up the camcorder and thinks the tape is blank.

The clips can also be placed into a playlist; you can choose where you want the clip to start, and voila some basic playback editing without ever leaving the camcorder interface. You won't have to waste an entire DVD (or bore a viewer with vacation footage of your spouse snoring).

I used the FS100 *all day* in Hollywood, CA during an outing with two little girls and my friend. We were indoors, outdoors, in overcast, sunny, and shady areas. I also tested out the camera around our house and home office. I set the camcorder to its highest setting (using a 16GB card) and widescreen format. I fiddled with the lighting options depending on where I was so that I got the most natural color. It handled like a champ and I will go into quality details in a bit.

Zoom works amazingly well, obviously still has a bit of a shake in the end, but the stabilization seems better than other camcorders.

I worried about the battery life because it seemed short on paper, but using it all day without its Quick Start option (letting it hibernate so you can just open the screen and instantly record something), was dandy. The battery used up about 25% of its power! (By the way, you can view how the battery is doing without turning the camcorder on by a press of a button.)

Okay, CONS:

The programs it comes with are...crap. Sorry, but don't plan on using them for much unless you need very, very basic editing capabilities. Don't even consider using the still-photo camera. I don't know why Canon even bothered with it at all. Some cell phones take better pictures.

Since I have Premiere, I just wanted to use my reader, but a 16GB SD card requires me to purchase a newer reader because it's so large. I tried USB direct to my computer: WAY. TOO. SLOW. So I thought I would install the program for now just to transfer my footage, but that also was too slow. I ended up purchasing the Transcend reader on Amazon for ~$9 and it worked great.

The footage comes in .MOD files, which you can supposedly rename to .MPEG, but I downloaded SDCopy and it does this for me, as well as marks the footage as widescreen so that they play in Windows Media Player *in widescreen*. Without SDCopy, WMP plays the files in 4:3 format, which means everything looks squashed.

BUT, my Premiere doesn't see the files as widescreen at all. Windows Movie Maker does, but I really don't want to use that for editing. I tried Avidemux, and it didn't pull in the audio. So, I still have a problem to figure out.

My Premiere also didn't recognize the audio in the MOD or MPEG files. I searched online and my version (Pro 1.5) picked up the audio once I uninstalled PowerDVD. (I know if you have Premiere CS3, then you can add a .DLL file that recognizes the audio.)

The camcorder doesn't like low light. Quality goes a bit downhill. It does have a light you can turn on, but it doesn't make that much of a difference.

I haven't played with the settings to see if I can fix this, but the camcorder also meters for the brightest thing it's looking at which means a person in front of a window, or even if the window is off to the side, will be very dark. The light through the window just gets blown out, so I had to angle the camcorder away from such "direct" light to catch my subject-in-shadow nicely.

SUMMARY:

Great camcorder with lovely features, but complicating issues with retrieving files, so I couldn't give it 5 stars. Still love it.

I've been avoiding buying a new camcorder to replace the 8 year old DVC tape unit for awhile now. There were plenty of tempting offerings, but none matched the feature set and price point that I was looking for until I happened upon Canon's FS100 model at an Apple Store. While giving it a once over there, I liked the light weight, the responsive and variable zoom, the microphone input, and that at $399, it was still very much reasonable in price. I almost bought it right there at the Apple Store, but resolved to sleep on it first and check out what other people were saying about it. I'm glad I did, and afterwards I almost gave it a miss but decided that no other camcorder available currently in the this price range would meet my needs.

Let me say what I liked about it first. As said before, It's lightweight and small enough to fit in most pants pockets (or are you just happy to see me?) without making you walk funny. The unit measures 2.3-inches wide, 2.4-inches high, and 4.9-inches deep. It weighs about 9.2 ounces. It starts up almost instantly and is ready to record within a few seconds. It has a large 2.7-inch LCD display that is clear. It has a relatively easy menu system for setting up some of the various built-in features all of which a clearly displayed on the LCD. It has a variable zoom that can be as fast or as slow as the user might wish and there are some settings in the menu that allow you to adjust this even more. The battery lasted almost 2 hours of near continuous use for me (your usage will vary dependent on a number of factors). In it's highest video resolution mode, you can get nearly 2 hours of video from an 8GB SDHC memory card, though Canon states that you can get over 5 hours of video from the same card at a lower resolution. Keep in mind that while this camcorder does record in either 4:3 or 16:9, it isn't true high definition and if that's something you must have in a camcorder, keep on looking.

There are a number of effects available from the FS100's menus, like fade-in/fade-out, Sepia, and Black and white recording modes, Mosaic, and a few others of varying effectiveness. Most of these probably sound like nice additions, but I doubt you'll use them more than once. There are a number of Automatic Exposure settings as well (AE in the menu) including TV, Portrait, Sports, Night, Snow, Fireworks, etc. Chances are unless you have specific needs, the Auto setting will work just fine in most conditions. You can manually set the White Balance as well as the unit having Auto, Daylight, and Tungsten presets.

Canon does not supply any memory for this camera (though essentially the same camera models FS10 and FS11 has 8GB and 16GB built-in respectively for a higher price), so an SD (preferable an SDHC card) will be required. I put in an 8GB SDHC card from Transcend that cost roughly about $31 and if even more storage is needed the camcorder accepts 16GB cards as well.

One of the main reasons I bought this camcorder was that it had a microphone input. The input uses an industry standard 3.5mm jack (there are adapters available for other sized inputs from places like Radio Shack) and as long as Phantom power is not required, the FS100 should be able to use nearly any non-XLR microphone. The built-in microphone is very sensitive and does a pretty good job, but is subject to some wind noise as most built-in microphones are.

Now some of the things I don't like about this camcorder. The image sensor is only a little more than 1 megapixel. Still images look a little washed out and with both video and still images. The FS100 also does not do so well in low-light situations. I've used it now under some different lighting conditions and have had varied results. Fireworks seemed OK. The FS100 quickly adjusted itself from almost total darkness to bright bursts withe little effort. Also the FS100 had little trouble with typical stadium lighting, but any constant low-light situation was not that great.

The FS100 does take still pictures as well as video and it can shoot up to 5 frames a second. The image sensor as I said is only 1 megapixel so this is more like a stop-gap convergence answer for digital photography than a dedicated point and shoot. If your main focus is taking pictures and you want them to scale well in various sizes, the FS100 is not the answer for you.

The included software seemed next to useless to me or most likely any other Mac user that already has iPhoto for digital images. Once you have the camera plugged into a USB port and it mounts on your desktop, iPhoto should (depending on your settings) automatically start up. Downloading your still images using iPhoto is pretty straight forward like most digital cameras.

OK, let's talk about what this kind of stuff this unit is really meant for: video. Honestly, even with the complaining I've done (and I'm not through yet), I liked the video this camera put out. While low-light certainly isn't a strong point, it does pretty well in every other situation and I liked what I saw. Here's what I didn't like though, .MOD files. Know what those are? Apparently they're some kind of modified mpeg-2 format that Canon uses. iMovie 06 and QuickTime 7 had no idea what to do with these files and it took a little research to find a solution.

A company called Squared5 makes a software converter called MPEG Steamclip that is an absolute free download and that will take those .MOD files and make them QuickTime compatible files (in a variety of formats). Also iMovie 08 will import them as well.

One other minor complaint is that if you want to download the content off the camera, you'll either need to remove the card and put it in a reader or connect the camera via USB. No big deal in itself, but if you connect the camera directly, you MUST have the power cable connected and supplying power as well. If you're out and about, that may not be easy. You might be better of having a few other memory cards to use until you offload them later. Also no battery charger is included so the only way to charge the batter right out of the box is to have it inside the camera and connected to power.

I really like this camera even with all the complaining I've done and it will be my main family shooter for at least a few years. I can live with its shortcomings as it is light, easy to use, takes great non-HD video and it has an external microphone connection.

MyMac rating:3 out of 5

Buy Canon FS100 Flash Memory Camcorder with 48x Advanced Zoom (Silver) Now

I've been looking to update my old Sony Digital8 camcorder and have been looking primarily at Mini-DV. But, this flash camcorder caught my eye since the price of SD cards has become amazingly inexpensive. To transfer video from a DV recorder takes a lot of patience, gigabytes of storage, and hours of work. By contrast, a 4gig SDHC card in this camera can store an hour and 20 minutes at 6 mb/s. The camera will do 9 mb/s, but I don't recommend it if your final format is DVD since some players will have problems keeping up.

My suggestion is to ignore most of the instructions which Canon provides and keep the software CD's in the box. There's a cute warning attached to the USB cable which warns NOT to connect it without first installing the drivers. I connected it to my MAC running OS-X 10.4 and a warning came on the screen to plug in the AC adapter. Once I did that the camera came right up as a disk drive. The manual warns not to access the folders directly. I did that, too and simply copied them to the local hard drive (more on that in a minute). Then, the camera warned NOT to change modes, or disconnect the USB cable, or disconnect the power. Ok... then, after I dismount the USB drive, how do I unplug the camera :) The manual gives a clue to disconnect the USB first, then power off.

By the way, it's just much, much less hassle to purchase an SDHC/MMC card reader and copy the folders off.

If you wish to mess with iMovie and other specialized software, then I suppose you'll have to keep your file structure proper and follow the manual more closely. I use Final Cut on the Mac, not iMovie, so my first concern was, What is a MOD file and an MOI file? That is what you're left with after you copy your card. The short answer is, toss the MOI files assuming you are not using the on-camera editing features. I just record and dump to the hard drive and edit with Final Cut.

A MOD file (not to be confused with the music format file) is just an mpeg2 file with audio included. This will confuse some Windows programs which expect the audio in a separate file, so use Media Player Classic. Quicktime on the Mac had no problem playing the file, although you may need to download the MPEG-2 Playback Component. Finally, the aspect ratio setting in a MOD file may not be correct for WideScreen format. You may need Mpeg tools to correct the header if you shoot WideScreen.

Next, Mpeg2 is not an "editable" format like DV. It's about 1/5 the size on my system and a single 4gig card backs up nicely onto a single layer DVD-R. You'll need to do something with the MOD files. My program of choice on the Mac is Visual Hub which is quite reasonably priced shareware. I simply dragged my Canon MOD files to it, selected "DV" and "Ready for Final Cut" and "Start." I was left with DV files ready to edit, although 5x larger. There's even a setting to force 16:9 aspect ratio. The catch is that you'll need to re-encode back to Mpeg2 if you're burning for DVD.

The nice thing is there aren't any tapes to get dirty and wear out. Flash cards may be used hundreds or thousands of times, unlike DV tapes which are used once or twice. The size of files are very small and easily archived, over an hour of video on a single DVD-R of raw footage. But, re-encoding to DV and back to Mpeg2 will sacrifice some quality. I think it's a good trade-off to using a DV recorder since you can do in minutes what it would usually take hours or days.

As for the features of the camcorder, it has an external mic jack. Thank-you Canon. Finally, someone is listening. If you've ever had to record a conversation in a noisy room you will appreciate the ability to use a directional mic. No headphones, but it has an audio meter level display. White balance! Numerous white balance settings as well as manual. Auto and manual shutter speed, exposure, focus, and audio gain at your finger tips. And, an "Easy Mode" for full automatic for those who hate buttons or just need to grab a quick action shot press "on", press "easy", press "record" and you're recording in seconds. No moving parts except for the lens cap, which is automatic and built-in. No more lost lens cap or one which is smacking into the microphone in the wind while you're recording. And, size I can hide the camera in the palm of my hand. It's tiny, lightweight, and easy to shoot without getting tired.

As for the not so hot stuff, the recording light is an LED. My old Sony Digital 8 camcorder used a tiny light bulb which appeared as natural light. The LED light is certainly better on the battery but makes everything blue-ish. Battery is internal, nice design but you're stuck with whatever capacity will fit into that size battery bay. Batteries and charging accessories cost a fortune, although SDHC cards are cheap. The built-in microphone will need some acoustic foam glued over it or check around for a strap-on wind sock. No viewfinder, not that I use one very much you will need to shoot with the LCD open.

Read Best Reviews of Canon FS100 Flash Memory Camcorder with 48x Advanced Zoom (Silver) Here

Overall the camera is a good little unit with an exceptional zoom. I was very impressed with the zoom quality. I bought this as a replacement to my previous mini DV tape camcorder that quit recording sound. We simply use it to record family moments so I'm not doing any kind of professional video recording.

I do like the idea of having the SD cards vs. a hard drive. I can change out and replace the SD cards even if they go bad but if the hard drive goes bad in a hard drive camcorder, it will probably be hard to replace. Also I will never be stuck filling up my hard drive and having no where to unload the video. After doing some testing, I had a newer SD 4G memory card and the recorder would let me record about 1 hour and 45 min. of video (I think that's right). I also found it VERY easy to transfer the video straight into my computer with an SD reader. This was a HUGE problem with my previous recorder because it had problems transferring the video from the mini DV tapes to the PC.

I haven't used the still photo capability yet and don't plan to since I have a good digital camera so I can't comment on it.

I only have a couple of issues:

1. The SD software that comes with the recorder has a little glitch (ONLY with the colored units; the blue and red) when entering the serial number to register the software it doesn't recognize the serial number from the unit. You actually have to change the first 3 numbers from 822 to 808 to get the serial number to accept. I found this from an earlier review on this site.

2. My other issue is the sound can be a little better. It was a little low but I can live with it.

3. One last thing, it DOES NOT come with a separate battery charger so you are forced to charge the battery while it's in the recorder. . Canon 2590B002 CG-800 Lithium Ion Battery Charger for 800 Series Batteries

Overall, for the price and its capabilities, it is a good camcorder.

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I bought this from amazon recently. It's simply as good as the other folks have said it is.

Battery life :awesome, above 2 hours of charge (have not charged it again in a week). Taken 1 hr or so of XP, SP quality videos. Windows vista simply rocks....plug the SD card in my HP entertainment PC and it takes care of everything. No file modification/renaming etc required.

Size/Ergonomics: Perfect, just like holding a 200ml can of red bull. sideways,that's all :)

Very easy1 handed operation, I am not worried about arthritis since the thing is soooo light even with the batery included. just handhold one of them sony dvd camcorders and you shall appreciate the small footprint of this thing.

NOW, the ONLY reason I am giving a review here is cos of reading the other folks consistently talk about the "night" "indoor" quality of the camcorder. Ok, I do agree to a certain extent that the indoors/lowlight videos are grainy. But I ask you folks, in what MODE ? P, Night,Sunset ? I am prettysure that that would be your answer.

Being an avid photographer, I never use any of the preset "Scene" modes ever even on my slr or this camcorder. So,my solution to *reduce* the grainy quality for you would be to try the "Shutter priority mode" , Tv, turn the shutter down to 1/30, 1/15(indoors), or even 1/8(handholding will be tough at the slowest shutter speed). BUT, if you use this mode and increase the exposure to say +2 or 3 , I am very certain that your low light videos will turn out pretty pretty usable and less grainy. Please try it out guys and let me know.

Anyway, I just wanted to rescue the camcorder from the night video quality complaints.

What else....it's a bang for the buck camcorder. Amazon is awesome. They have refunded me all the price differences within 30 days of shipping. I have saved $15 already. Buy it folks, this should be a great camcorder. I am a hardcore canon user (cameras, camcorder). Battery life of canons is one big draw for me. Let me know how the "Tv" mode works out for you guys.