Canon MVX200i - My choice of camcorder!

I looked long and hard before buying a camcorder – I wanted to find a balance between price and image quality. My first choices were the Panasonic NVGS120 – 3ccd at under £450, and the tiny Canon MVX20i and 25i. Both, I am sure, would have given a better picture quality, but the Panasonic had awful picture stabilisation and I just couldn’t hold it steady, while the canon 20/25i ran at least £600 – a little more than I would chose to spend! Cameras are available for just over £100, but you just could not expect a really good quality picture for that price.

The MVX200i is the bottom model of 3 options – the 200i, the 200 and the 250i. All are basically the same (ie the same lens, casing etc) but the more you pay the more you get. The 250i offers additional zoom, a super + night mode, and things like dv-in. And sure enough these are things you may miss with the 200i – the night mode is not brilliant and while you can output the video to your PC, you cannot put the edited video directly back on to the camcorder’s mini dv tape. But do you want to pay the extra £100 or so? I chose not to.

The 200i is a nice size, definitely portable. In fact I am rather impressed with how small it is, although there are smaller camcorders out there. Even more importantly I can hold it without shaking. An absolute must is to go and hold the camera. I find that some camcorders are comfortable and easy to hold still, and some are not. I suspect this is a personal thing depending on the size of your hand. If you gain only one thing from this review it should be the importance of getting a shop to power up the camcorder so you can see how much it shakes when you hold it!

Plus you also get “true 16:9 mode” which means you turn it to 16:9 mode, the picture gets thinner but wider and your video then looks right on a widescreen TV!

What would I change? It would be a huge bonus to put edited video from the PC back on to the Mini-DV tape. And I must admit that the manual is a bit rubbish at times, as is their webiste. But thats pretty minor all in all!

The hidden costs;
Of course you don’t get everything you need. With the above extra package you get the camcorder, 2 batteries, 1 minidv tape, remote control, 8mb memory card, lens cap, usb lead for transferring photos to the PC, case, lead for charging the battery, basic software, and a lead & scart for viewing the video on a tv. There might have been a few other things chucked in but that is most of it. What you have to buy; 1 mini dv tape wont last you a life time; £10 for a pack of 5 off ebay. There is no firewire stuff included, so no way of transferring video to your PC; Firewire card and cable (6 pin to 4pin) from £15 ish (presuming your PC doesn’t have firewire. Also you may want to get software like Ulead Video Studio thrown in). You may want to buy a UV lens which will protect your camcorder lens from damage and improve video quality in bright sunlight - £10 ish from Ebay (I haven’t received mine yet, so the review is all without the effect of the lens!). Finally you may want to soup-up your PC – you will need a vaguely reasonable PC to edit video without huge delays, but it seems to take less power than what a lot of other people say on the internet.