Review – Canon Legria HFS11 Camcorder
Canon's Legria HFS11
When we tested four of the best AVCHD palm-corders (Issue 3) the Canon Legria HFS10 won by a nose. We loved the image quality, the fantastic autofocus, the neat styling and well thought out user interface.
Just a couple of months on and Canon have tweaked the formula, added one and released the HFS11.
Externally the camera is pretty much identical to its predecessor, which is no bad thing. It looks uber-cool and is light but solidly built. There are just two major tweaks inside the pretty package, and a few minor ones.
The first tweak is a doubling of the internal video memory to 64GBytes – enough for over 5 and a half hours of recording even at the highest possible quality (1080p/25 at 24Mbps). Of course, there’s an SDHC card slot as well.
Canon have also improved the Optical Image Stabilisation – it is now pretty amazing. With a little care you can get a pretty steady shot right at the long end of the fabulous 10x zoom lens.
The HFS10 suffered from bad picture noise in low-light scenes – Canon have always had a pretty laid-back approach to noise reduction, preferring it to the blurring effect that too much software noise reduction exhibits. The HFS11 seems to have much lower intrinsic noise in darkened rooms than its predecessor without apparently resorting to just fuzzing everything out.
Other than that, the HFS11 carries over the features from the HFS10 that makes it the best in its class, from Canon’s pseudo-progressive scan to pro features like zebras and peaking focus assist. The progressive scan is interesting – it slightly reduces vertical resolution – like other Canon camcorders – hinting at some line doubling going on, but in real life (if you aren’t filming a static scene on a tripod) you get better apparent resolution using progressive than interlace. It’s also worth mentioning again Canon’s amazing autofocus, helped by the contrast detection dohicky on the front of the camera. It snaps into focus better – a LOT better – than any other camera in its class – or any other class come to that.
The HFS11 is available at a street price of about £1000 inc VAT, about £200 more than its predecessor. The new OIS and better low light performance just about justify the price difference but it’s still an expensive camera.
