Canon Vixia HV30

by Laura
(New Mexico)

The Canon HV30 is my one and only video camera ever. I've borrowed friends SD videocams and was never terribly impressed with image quality of consumer videocams. THIS one is a completely different story, I love it.

For starters, I have small hands and don't work out with weights all the time. I like the size, weight and convenience of this videocam. I love the features. For a sub $600 unit there is a lot of goodness under the hood. I have a multitude of shooting modes to work with (2 DVs and 3 HDVs). It's just a one chip camera, but the quality of images is wonderful, the optics are high end and the image stabilization works very well.

One thing I really like about the HV30 is that it still uses DV tapes. For some people this might be an issue but for me, I'm not ready to transition to everything being digital, I personally like recording on tape, editing digitally and then saving both digitally and on tape for ultimate preservation of media. Tapes are extremely inexpensive now so it's easy to create huge libraries of moving images for little cost.

I love that the HV30 seemingly has every output port conceivable to man. This is great for someone like me who is in the midst of changing computers as well as monitors and editing setups because I can use either firewire, usb (but as last choice), composite, component and of course HDMI. I love it when manufacturers aren't stingy about this stuff because it makes life so much easier getting information from camera to computer.

I have heard people rave about the low light capabilities of this camera, I can't honestly say that I was blown away by it in low light. It's good enough, but not great, certainly not a professional level videocam in these conditions. In great/good lighting, the images are very clean and crisp, color fidelity great.



The only thing that's not great about this video camera is the onboard mic isn't great for sound capture. I think I need to buy a decent external mike though this might be something people have to do anyways with non-professional gear.


All in all, I wouldn't trade this model at all. There is a new Canon HV40 being released and I imagine that the HV30 might be going the way of the dodo. Snap them up at this incredible price when you can!