Canon MD101

A Canon MD101 Camcorder Review - I hadn't read a bad review about this camera so I purchased one for my daughter who uses a Canon S3 for wildlife photography and fancied a crack at video. The low cost (and I mean low), of this camcorder along with the 30x optical zoom were attractive for something which would function at least as a starter kit. However. On removal from the box the first thing which struck me was a distinct lack of robustness, something which I'd not been used to with Canon camcorders and I've used a few with various projects which I've worked on. This aspect extended to the joystick which is placed in the bottom corner of the LCD panel. The stick is plastic and gives the sense that it could break at any time although to be fair, it hasn't yet. Image quality is not great: there is considerable noise in low light and this is not only apparent indoors " even a dull day produces some loss of quality. Manual focus and exposure are easily accessed but I've had problems getting out of these modes and sometimes the manual slide indicator does not appear in the LCD. I don't advocate the use of an LCD, preferring the viewfinder, but to access the viewfinder you have to close the LCD panel, which means that the manual focus control is redundant. There are two digital zoom settings and these are best avoided but if desperate, the 90x setting could be used. Pixellation is massive on the 800x, as one would expect. Again, these sometimes fail to respond to the settings. That's the down side and I've probably painted a pretty poor picture of this camera but it has it's good points too. I guess it is unfair to be over critical because at this price (I paid around £135 for it), you're not going to get anything approaching the bees knees. The zoom is impressive but even with the image stabilizer, you will need a tripod and that means one with a video head if you're going to pan and tilt. There does seem to be an improvement in resolution with the stabilizer off and if you are using a tripod you can leave it off all the time. The battery life is excellent; a full charge will last for ages but if you are out and about you would be advised to purchase a spare. That's the problem with camcorders " you soon find yourself spending additional money on other items such as tripods and batteries, but it all depends on how serious you are about your film-making. The menu is fairly standard Canon, which may take a little getting used to if you've never encountered it, but once you've found your way round it makes good sense. The camera records on DV tape, still my preference, and has a microphone socket which is unusual for a low end camera. With that on board though, a headphone socket woud be useful as well. There's no USB connection but there is firewire, which is good enough if you are downloading for editing. If you want to get into film-making even remotely seriously, I'd say avoid this camera. As a starter kit it's fine but even at that level, if you get hooked you may find that you soon want to upgrade. My advice would be to splash out a few more pounds at the start. Of course, if you only want to record the video equivalent of holiday snaps or aren't that discerning, it may well suit you perfectly.