Canon HF100: first impressions

I am putting up a a series of articles about new Canon tapeless camera, the HF100. I am starting with general look and feel of the camera. Bear in mind that these are my personal impressions.

I will talk in detail about video modes and camera performance in the next installment. I will also share clips and framegrabs.

Design

The left side of the HF100 has as much style as a brick. An unknown Canon designer put a square box around the flash, the iAF sensor and the LCD screen, a practical but not a very artful decision. The right side is rounded, as the body wraps the lens barrel. The squared bottom has a different texture and color, so it appears as if the camera is mounted on a cradle. If you squint you may think that this is a small mediaval cannon on a carriage.

The front of the camera presents the lens with 37 mm thread for attachments, the small LED light, the iAF sensor and the flash. Why Canon decided to put the iAF sensor beside the lens pushing the light below it is beyond comprehension. A wide-angle adapter or a lens hood obstructs the iAF sensor, rendering it useless. At least the stereo microphone is located in the right place, below the lens, not above it like on many Panasonic and Sony models.

The back side is taken by a battery. Gaps between the battery and the body are inconsistent, the gap on the left is suprisingly wide for a quality product. This would not be a big deal for a Chinese knock-off, but this camera is a Japanese product for crying out loud. Sony has nothing to worry about.

The top of the camera hides a proprietary acessory shoe under a tethered cover, just like on Sony cameras of yore. Alas, this year Sony camcorders sport fancy covers that slide and fold and hide in a camera body. Compared to Sony's art of mechanics, the simple covers on the Canon camcorder look crude and cheap. They are painted from outside only, hinting that Canon was saving every penny.

At least the HF100 does not squeak like the HV20 did. The HF100 uses solid-state recording media, so the tape drive assembly is gone, along with creaking of the tape door and whining of the tape motor. The camera has no moving parts except for the optical image stabilization system (OIS) and lens zoom servo motor.

When the camera is turned off, the OIS gyros rattle inside the camera, frightening uninformed consumers. Some of them insist on replacing a "defective" camera. Sony eliminated the OIS rattle in its latest products, taking one more step to perfection and giving customers one less reason to return the product.

Canon could at least put a warning sticker on the camcorder. Instead, Canon directed its efforts into creating something as meaningless as "Vixia". My attempts to scratch this stupid lettering from the LCD cover have failed, so I can attest that the paint job is done well.

On-camera attachments

With the HF10 and HF100 Canon introduced a smaller accessory shoe for on-camera attachments. Space savings are insignificant to justify the switch from older Advanced accessory shoe used on previous Canon cameras. The actual reason for the change is to shove Canon-branded products into customers' throats, like the DM-100 microphone. With $200 list price I wonder what margin on this one might be.

If you still want to use your own mic, then a $40 shoe adapter will rescue you from Canon's keep. Yep, it is just a small piece of aluminum, but can you make one yourself? Seeing how greedy Canon has got, I am surprised that this adapter is not offered by Canon itself.

The camera has a standard tripod socket on the bottom. The socket is located close to the front of the camera, so unless you have a heavy wide-angle adapter attached, the camera will tend to tip back. There is no hole for a locking pin. On the other hand, there is a groove, which matches the tripod locking pin almost as good as a dedicated hole.

Lens attachments

The HF has a 37mm lens thread for filters, tele- and wide-angle converters and lens hoods. This size is not very common to Canon camcorders, other sizes were used more often in the past, like 34mm or 43mm or even 27mm. The good news is that 37mm is popular with Panasonic and Sony, so there is a broad choice of attachments.

The thread is made of plastic, which is very dissappointing, considering fancy milled aluminum lens barrel. The shiny barrel looks great, but is totally dysfunctional and only adds extra weight. The threads are functional, but made of plastic, um, to save weight? Go figure.

Other connectors

HDMI output has a mini (Type C) connector. Neither a cable nor an adapter for a standard HDMI connector is supplied. Canon wants $70 for the HTC-100 cable. Yeah, right. Get an adapter from monoprice.com for $5.

If all HDMI inputs of your HDTV are taken by other equipment, you can still get full high definition video from the camcorder using component cables.

AV output shares the same socket with headphone output. The standard 3.5mm stereo jack is used for headphones. In AV output mode the socket provides composite video along with stereo sound through a relatively common 4-post 3.5mm connector.

USB socket uses a mini-USB connector, a cable for a standard USB computer port is supplied with the camera. It is unlikely that you will be using this cable as it is much simpler to pull out a memory card from the camera and insert it into computer's card reader directly.

Some older computers can read SD cards, but do not recognize SDHC cards. This can be easily remedied with a SD/SDHC/MMC card adapter. I bought an adapter at a local electronics store for just $8. Works flawlessly with my SD and SDHC cards when inserted into a standard USB socket.

Media

Canon does not provide any media with its camcorder. Maybe this is a good thing after all. The HF10 has 16GB of built-in media and costs $200 more than the HF100. Would you like paying $200 for a bundled 16GB SDHC card? I would not. The prices on memory cards are constantly falling, I bought a 4GB card in my local electronics store for $20. If I want more capacity, I can order a 16GB card off the Web for just $70. I prefer 4GB cards as it is very simple to perform a complete card backup onto single-layer DVD disks, with all supplemental files and directories. The resulting disks are also playable in my Blu-ray player.

Make sure you are getting a Class 6 card, do not get the cheapest one, as it may not provide enough bandwidth despite labelling. The camera verifies card type when you switch recording modes. If the card is slower than Class 4, the camera will not record in FXP+ mode, which peaks at 17 Mbit/s.

Power

The HF has got an "intelligent" battery that not only connects electrically, but provides information about the charge left, at one minute precision. The marketing booklets do not disclose whether the new batteries exchange other data with the camera, like manufacturer's name or serial number. It is possible that the camera will reject non-genuine batteries, effectivey putting an end to battery communism.

There is no definitive information on the topic yet, but it is very likely that cheap third-party batteries for $20, $15 or even $9.95 apiece will not work with the HF. You will have to shell out about $90-130 for Canon-branded batteries unless you are willing to tolerate an ugly cable from a third-party battery to the camera DC terminal.

In a good news, Canon did not design a new DC socket. The power supply from my old Elura 100 works fine with the HF100, as the connector shape (round) and voltage (8.4 V) are the same.

To be continued

In the next installment I will talk about camera controls and video quality. Finally, you will see framegrabs, some of which are really bizzare. Stay tuned!