Canon ZR70MC Mini DV Camcorder
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- Recording System: NTSC
- Camcorder Type: Digital
- Recording Media: Mini DV
- Optical Zoom: 22x
- Weight: 1.2 lb.
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Nice little camcorder
Pros
Beautiful video, easy connection to PC, good battery life
Cons
low light pictures and video are not that great. Need FireWire for transfering video
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
Overall I think this camcorder is well worth the price paid.
My wife and I purchased this camcorder about a year ago as a settlement to an argument. I wanted a decent digital camera for taking quick pictures, nothing too fancy. She wanted a good camcorder for vacations and such. We settled on this camcorder as it would do both.
The video quality in good light is excellent. In lower light situations however it starts to suffer. The picture quality is also very good as long as light is sufficient. In fact almost everything we have shot outdoors (which is where we use it the most anyway) has come out beautiful, very vibrant colors. The only downfall is the pictures are 1024x768 which for use is adequate but for those that plan on blowing things up or printing them out it may be better to get an actual digital camera. The camcorder itself is also very easy to use and it very intuitive I thought. I was up and capturing video within minutes.
The connection to a computer was what impressed me the most. I was transferring digital video into the Windows XP movie maker within 5 minutes of taking the cable and software out of the box. Once the camcorder was connected to the PC using the included FireWire cable you could control the camcorder from the computer, rewinding, playing, etc. Same with digital pictures, its so easy to transfer them to your PC and edit or email them out. The driver for the pictures has a nice index feature so you can see all the pictures and select the ones to download, and the downloads are relatively fast.
Some people have said its noisy but I think it makes less noise then a standard camcorder, plus its much smaller. It easily fits in your hand and having both a standard viewfinder and a LCD allows you some flexibility in how you hold it to take pictures or video. I'm glad we got this instead of a separate cheap camera and a regular super8 or vhs-c camcorder.
The video quality in good light is excellent. In lower light situations however it starts to suffer. The picture quality is also very good as long as light is sufficient. In fact almost everything we have shot outdoors (which is where we use it the most anyway) has come out beautiful, very vibrant colors. The only downfall is the pictures are 1024x768 which for use is adequate but for those that plan on blowing things up or printing them out it may be better to get an actual digital camera. The camcorder itself is also very easy to use and it very intuitive I thought. I was up and capturing video within minutes.
The connection to a computer was what impressed me the most. I was transferring digital video into the Windows XP movie maker within 5 minutes of taking the cable and software out of the box. Once the camcorder was connected to the PC using the included FireWire cable you could control the camcorder from the computer, rewinding, playing, etc. Same with digital pictures, its so easy to transfer them to your PC and edit or email them out. The driver for the pictures has a nice index feature so you can see all the pictures and select the ones to download, and the downloads are relatively fast.
Some people have said its noisy but I think it makes less noise then a standard camcorder, plus its much smaller. It easily fits in your hand and having both a standard viewfinder and a LCD allows you some flexibility in how you hold it to take pictures or video. I'm glad we got this instead of a separate cheap camera and a regular super8 or vhs-c camcorder.
