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The Legria HF G10 is currently Canon’s flagship consumer camcorder. The principle attractions include a big ‘HD CMOS Pro’ image sensor, a superior lens and lots of manual controls. It is a serious slice of camcorder alright, but is it definitely worth the high asking price of £1,200 or thereabouts?
Design
The top end of the shopper camcorder market generally is a somewhat confusing place. Prices appear to vary wildly, while quite a lot of different features was adopted by manufacturers as key selling points, including progressive recording, GPS or even built-in projectors. With the G10, Canon’s tactic is to concentrate on the standard of the device’s high-definition video output, whilst also offering a tempting proposition for individuals who wish to take manual control in their creations.
Canon’s touchscreen user interface is definitely implemented in this camcorder.
The G10 isn’t small by current standards. The massive barrel a part of the barrel-grip body forms the housing of the sizeable high-definition video lens. Further bulk is available in the shape of an excessively big, 3.5-inch, fold-out display on one side and the camcorder’s grip at the other. Also adding to the beefiness are 32GB of internal memory, dual SDXC-compatible memory-card slots, a mini accessory shoe and an electronic viewfinder.The result’s a reasonably heavy — 545g — but well-balanced device. The matte black plastic shell feels reassuringly tough but doesn’t shout ‘prestige’ quite as much, perhaps, as a metal one would.
Controls
For a manual-control camcorder, there are surprisingly few buttons adorning the unit. At the grip side, there is a function switch that flicks between the auto, manual and ‘cinema’ modes, the latter comprising a dedicated choice of picture settings and filters geared toward delivering a film-type look on your recordings.Under the flip-out screen, you will find just a couple of buttons, and there are just two more user-assignable buttons at the screen bezel itself. The real secret to controlling the G10 lies in its touch-sensitive display, manual lens ring and customisable dial.Canon’s touchscreen controls are better implemented at the G10 than they’ve been within the past, thanks, largely, to the physically bigger, more responsive LCD screen. The screen itself may be very high quality, offering a 920,000-pixel resolution, and the user interface looks sharp. Menus are easy to navigate and there is some support for multi-touch gestures.The G10′s lens ring is there purely for manual focusing. Unlike some multitasking lens rings on other high-end camcorders, there is not any function button to toggle control of alternative settings, equivalent to aperture or shutter speed. That’s where the rear-mounted dial comes in.Pressing the ‘custom’ button while in manual mode will switch the dial between aperture and shutter, and rotating the dial up and down lets you fine-tune the settings for every. It is a good system but we found the site of the dial to be rather awkward. Unless you’re using a tripod, the dial is tricky to regulate without wobbling the camcorder and spoiling your shot.An impressive number of pro-end features fleshes out the G10′s credentials as an enthusiast’s device. These include a socket for an external microphone and optical image stabilisation, in addition to Canon’s Powered IS feature, that is particularly effective at keeping everything steady if you end up on the full zoom length.
Video quality
Taking centre stage is Canon’s excellent f1.8 HD video lens, which has a large angle of 30.4mm and an optical zoom length of 10x. The picture sensor’s resolution is solely 2.07 megapixels, which sounds worryingly low by modern standards. In fact, the CMOS sensor was specifically designed to capture ‘Full HD’ video at its native resolution of 1,920×1,080 pixels. Since each pixel is demonstrably larger than those you locate at the sensors contained in most other consumer models, the G10 is in a position to capture images with more clarity and no more noise, even in dimmer light conditions.
The rear-mounted dial is tricky to spin without shaking the G10 and spoiling your shot.
The sensor’s quality was borne out by some cracking ends up in our tests. On the best quality setting, which captures AVCHD video at an overly high bit rate of 24Mbps, picture quality is very good. Primary colours are deep and colourful with clearly defined edges and good levels of contrast. That is balanced by realistic handling of natural hues and skin tones. Artefacts and noise are almost entirely absent in daylight conditions or even daytime interior shots yield impressively noise-free results.The camcorder’s 8-blade iris, meanwhile, helps to provide some highly attractive bokeh focus effects, particularly when shooting human subjects against a blurred-out background.The G10′s default recording mode is 1080i video with a frame rate of fifty fields per second. Unlike the Panasonic HDC-SD900, there is not any solution to film in 1080p at a rate of fifty progressive frames per second. There’s a 25p mode but this does not deliver particularly smooth motion, offering only half the frames per second as Panasonic’s equivalent. The SD900 also records at a better bit rate (28Mbps), that’s perhaps why it produces a rather sharper all-round image than the G10.That said, the G10 continues to be a remarkable performer with its own advantages over the contest — its low-light performance and high-quality lens being chief among these. The massive problem, however, is the associated fee. Even essentially the most enthusiastic enthusiast can have trouble justifying the cost, particularly when the G10 is a lot more expensive than Panasonic’s excellent 900 series camcorders.
Conclusion
If you’re comparing camcorders on the top of the range, the Canon Legria HF G10 certainly has plenty going for it, particularly relating to image quality and manual controls. It’s bigger and lacks certain features compared to similar models from other manufacturers, however, and it is also one of the expensive consumer camcorders currently available. The G10 is an undeniably high achiever, it’s important to wonder if the marginal performance edge over some rivals is definitely worth the extra cost.Edited by Charles KloetÂ
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