Canon VIXIA HF200 HD Flash Memory Camcorder with 15x Optical Zoom

I bought this camera a few months ago and have been very impressed with the vivid clarity it captures. Canon packed a very powerful camera in a small package. The menu functions are intuitive and a breaze to use. The instruction manual is simple and straight forward. The camera is ready to go out of the box. I do recomend adjusting the factory settings.

As other reviewers have said I also use the FXP cinema setting at 24 fps with a 32gb class 4 sd card to capture up to 4 and half hours of video in true 1080p. I recomend using a class 4 sd card, any lower class and you will run into stuter problems. I haven't had any issues with class 4 or 6 but, anything beyound that and you'll run into problems. The camera will not recognize the sandisk extreme cards so don't waste your time or money. I recomend purchasing cards from SanDisk, the other companies sd cards have issues and are completely unreliable, sandisk has never given me problems and when your are shooting weddings and special events for clients the last thing you want is a problems.

For file transfering I use an internal floppy drive/sd card reader so I haven't had to install any of the software included with the camera. I don't recommend installing it either. I use sony vegas pro and I have no problems loading the sd card directly, editing my footage, and burning to DVD or Blu-ray.
The camera does come with a royalty free music CD for home movie editing. The CD includes music from famous composers such as Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" and Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" as well as some original mood music. This is a nice touch for people just getting started with video editing.

I recomend this camera for the casual consumer looking to move up to HD techonology, as a back up for a videographer, the student wanting to start shooting ideas in HD, a youtube poster, and any one else in between. Canon has benifitted the conmusumer with this introductory HD camera at an affordable price. Kudos!

VERY pleased with the camera but as much of virtues have been extolled elseware I will concentrate on software. The included Pixela software is rubbish and does not merit inclusion on your hard disk. After much searhing I have at last found good use for my Nero-9. It works magnificently.
1. copy your camcorder files (they have a .MTs extension)from your SD memory on to your hard disc.
2. In Nero, in 'Create and Edit' select the 'Author, Edit and Capture Video' option and from there, select 'Make Movie' option. Import your file into the 'My Media Files' box. If you want to join several of you camcorder files into ONE whole movie then select them all into 'My media files in the correct order.
3. Highlight each required in the reverse order and click the '+' button to place it into lower strip. Then click 'Next'.
4. Now select 'Export Movie' and now you can select which standard (MPEG-2, AVI etc) which you require.
5. Also click 'Configure' to select the other characteristics of the file that you require.

I wanted an MPEG-2 file so I chose the following 'Custom' Options.
a) Aspect Ratio - 16:9
b) Size - User Defined - Width 1920 Height - 1072
c) Video Quality - Maximum
d) Encoder quality fine tuning - 100
e) Audio Format - LPCM
I arrived at these values by quite a bit of experimentation but try finding your own preferences.
Now click 'OK' and then remember to click 'browse' and choose your prefered folder and file name for the resulting file. Finally click' Export.
I got a file about 1% larger than the original and as far as I could estimate, the quality
was as good as the original. I was HIGHLY delighted with Nero. I hope these suggestions help others.

It works really great, but is a little grainy in low light, so I just purchesed the bigger light. It takes really good pictures and flash works good too! Very happy with battery life, have not needed my back up battery the last 10 times I used it.

I read all the reviews for this camera before getting one and I just wanted to confirm that the relatively bad image quality with low light is ABSOLUTELY TRUE.
I wouldn't say that it's horrible, but I compared the quality with a movie taken with my very cheap Flip Mineo (the old basic model, not the HD) and it was pretty much the same. I don't know if competitor cameras at the same price point have the same problem though (I checked the specs for sensor, aperture and all that and they seemed equal or worse to this one) but it's definitely not something that I would consider HD.
Everything else is pretty good.

First I would say that the camera itself is excellent. However, there is one major downside to it and that is that the software that comes with it is absolutely horrible and cannot be used. Read the other reviews on the software topic and see for yourself. In fact, the manual doesn't even tell you how to upload the videos-I figured it out from reading reviews here on Amazon. The only way around the limited software is to buy another software editing program which has an added cost. Keep that in mind when you compare cost and features of other HD Camcorders. If you ever plan to edit video or put your videos on a DVD, which I would say includes about 99.9% of users, then don't buy this camera unless you meet all 3 of the following criteria: you have some other editing software, you are certain it will work with the MTS file format that this camera uses and you want to constantly tinker with settings and software to get this to come out in HD.