Canon’s first flash-based camcorder, the Canon Vixia HF10, delivers wonderful HD video quality and performance in a miniscule package. Canon may not have been 1st out of the gate with a flash-based camcorder–or 2nd, or third–but its debut model, the hi-def Vixia HF10, gets it right the 1st time. A graceful, black compact model with a well-rounded feature set, great video, and wonderful performance, the HF10 definitely merits a spot on your short list of potential home-movie camcorders.

The petite HF10 weighs 15.1 oz. with SD card and battery and measures 2.9 by 2.5 by 5.1 inches–small and adequately light to fit into a big jacket pocket, which is about as good as it is getting on the horizontal designs. That could be a hair smaller compared to its main rival, the Sony Handycam HDR-CX7 and noticeably more compact than its cousins, the hard-disk-based Vixia HG10 or tape-based Vixia HV30. Happily , the HF10 doesn’t appear to be afflicted by the usability issues that typically go with shrinkage.

The controls remain enormous and straightforward to operate, though Canon has moved a lot of them. The Function button and joystick, which call up and navigate often required shooting settings, now live on the LCD bezel. I am not a large fan of designs that do this, mostly because I find it tougher to at the same time operate the controls and hold the camera steady when they are on the LCD than when they lie under my right thumb. In addition, manually targeting with the joystick on the camcorder’s smallish 2.7-inch LCD could be a discomfort, with no regard for the zoom-view focus help.

It records AVCHD video at up to seventeen megabits per second ( two hours and five mins of video ), and can hold up to 6 hours and five mins of video at the lowest bit rate of 5Mbps. That higher bit rate goes to support the full 1,920×1,080 capture, the standard for most of the present year’s new models, compared with 1,440×1,080 for older AVCHD camcorders that needed only a 12Mbps maximum bit rate.

Its optically stabilised f1.8-3.0 12X zoom lens has a longer reach than the characteristic 10x lens available in this class, but the remainder of its features are fairly common in Canon’s prosumer models. You may record in progressive thirty or twenty-four frames-per-second ( fps ) modes as well as 60i.

For still photos, metering, flash, and burst and exposure bracketing options become available too.