Bought the FS100 for the birth of our baby boy. Once I had got used to the options and adjusted a few things the sound and picture are very good for a memory card based camcorder in this price range.
Mostly make sure you've turned off the wind guard option or the sound will be terrible in non windy recordings
It also has a White LED spot light for low light conditions which really helps...allot of camcorders lack this.
The auto focus in reasonable light conditions works well gives good 'crisp' video….however in low light conditions with the led light turned off its not quite as fast but just make sure not to move too quickly between focal points and all is fine.
The image stabilisation works well and doesn't compromise video quality much at all.
The optical zoom is good and it records in 16:9 (widescreen) so recordings look great on a WS telly…use it in Advanced zoom mode for maximum quality and ease of use.
Its also very easy to use and incredibly light and fairly small its half the size of my old JVC minidv camcorder and under a quarter of the weight, the battery lasts for well over 2 1/2 hours (haven't managed to run it out yet whilst recording)
I've got a class 6 16GB SDHC which cost me £25 incl delivery from fleabay and I can get 3hours and 46mins of top (XP) quality vids on it!!!!.
The biggest plus is the very very quick transfer times to your PC gone are the days of waiting hours for minidv camcorders.... a few clicks and couple of minutes and its all done..
Don't bother with the FS10 or FS11 with the built in memory as SDHC cards are cheap and getting cheaper.
Almost forgot to mention it has a fast start up time and if you leave it in standby (not totally off) it'll really is ready to shoot in less than 1 second !!!!!!!!!
The only bad points are that it doesn't feel as well built as my old JVC minidv camcorder…but I'll just be more careful with it. Plus the software supplied is basic but it does the job quickly (well it does on my home built quad core system)
I picked this up for just under £200 which for a brand new model isn't too bad but I suspect this is a vision of the future and all camcorders will go solid state soon and the price will come down to ~£100 like the base level Minidv camcorders from JVC and Canon have done.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Stylish and convenient- the FS100 is a compact camcorder that records directly to memory ... more
cards- making it easy to share and upload your footage. The 45x Advanced Zoom gets you closer to the action. Stylish camcorder to take anywhere SD/SDH...
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