I purchased the Vixia HF S100 to practice my videography and editing on a Macbook Pro. I spent countless hours researching consumer, prosumer, and professional camcorders. I compared brands, features, formats, reviews, and tons of footage on youtube and vimeo before making my decision. After using this camera I can say with certainty, if you have $1000 to spend on a camcorder, this is the one!
Here is why I'm happy with my choice: The footage has a professional quality to it. It rivals footage from professional 3CCD/CMOS cameras. It's not quite up there with cameras in the $3K or $4K range, but it's close. Here is a tip - set your max gain (low light compensation) to 0 or 6 db. Anything over than that and your blacks will be washed out.
There are enough manual features to accommodate the budding auteur. Or, set it to one of the many pre-programmed modes and get great looking video for any occasion without much effort. The cinema mode is one of the effects that you have to see; I recorded the downtown Atlanta skyline while driving on a bright day, and I was amazed when I played back the footage. It looks as if each building was painted with pastels. Almost surreal.
I'm sure some of you out there have been warned to stay away from the AVCHD format. I myself was curious how this was going to preform when editing the video. So far, I haven't had any issues. Here is what I believe the major advantages of AVCHD are: The high-compression lets you capture a ton of video on small SDHC cards. I purchased a 16 GB class 6 card on Amazon for $35, I'm shooting at the highest quality (24 Mbps) and get over 2 hour of video. In my opinion, that beats the heck out of mini DV tapes. Post-production software is catching up to the AVCHD standard - just look at Final Cut Studio 3. They have made major improvements on how AVCHD is handled. And I'm sure PC software is doing the same. The industry is changing. Post-production workflows are changing. Here is how the digital workflow will look soon: Shoot your footage to digital media, make an offline copy on DVD or Blu-ray. Ingest that footage onto a large capacity external hard drive. When you're finished, you archive the footage and re-use the media. Tapes will not be around forever. It just doesn't make sense with digital media becoming larger, faster, cheaper, and easier to edit.
My review would be one-sided if I didn't mention the shortcomings of this camera. First, Canon accessories are expensive! You will want the external mic (DM-100), long-life batteries, and possibly lens adapters. All of these things seem overpriced in my opinion. But, I justify it by telling myself the HF S100 is such a good deal at $1K, I'll spend some money on accessories.
Second, the optical image stabilization doesn't blow me away. I like to implement a good number of moving shots. These take a very steady hand with this camera. It is very sensitive to shake and jitter. I contribute this minor flaw to how light this camera is. In fact, some of the shake can be compensated for by adding weight to the camera (a collapsed tripod works well).
And last, the LCD screen is small. Manual focus can be tricky, but you can choose between several zebra striping or peaking options for focus assist. That being said, the joystick on the LCD screen is easy to control. Still, I'm hoping Canon will give us at least a 3" LCD in the next iteration of this otherwise great camcorder.
All-in-all, this a worthy camcorder with nice features and an output that should even satisfy discriminating videographers. I truly believe that this is the most camcorder you can get for the price.Get more detail about Canon VIXIA HFS100 HD Flash Memory Camcorder with 10x Optical Zoom.
