Canon ZR65MC

The best value in Canon's current ZR series, the ZR65MC offers a compact and easy-to-use design, an on-target feature set, and overall good video quality for an attractive budget price. It has a few flaws--look elsewhere if you plan to shoot in dim light or silent rooms, for example--but on the whole, it makes a compelling buy for first-timers or cash-strapped videographers.

If you want these to light up on demand, you'll have to upgrade to the ZR70MC.

As a whole, the ZR65MC hangs together nicely. Thanks to its compact size and light 1-pound, 6-ounce weight with battery and cassette loaded, you'll rarely miss any video opportunities simply because you decided to leave the camcorder home. The buttons and switches that fall comfortably under your fingers provide more or less sensibly structured access to settings.

One of the main selling points of the ZR65MC's design is how easily you can operate the cam without flipping open the LCD; the only buttons that lie underneath it control the in-camera special effects, display options, photo self-timer and video time code, and selection of auto or programmed exposure. Light-up playback buttons, which double as search, exposure-shift, and manual-focus selectors, sit above the LCD, while the menu button and navigation rocker switch lie just behind it. Pressing the Nav switch brings up a selection of shooting scene modes. Though slightly stiff, the power/mode switch is operable with your right thumb, and the zoom lever and photo button fall naturally under the right index finger--at least, that of a long-fingered female. It's all simple, clean, and nonthreatening for newbies.

Canon keeps things simple for your right hand: power and zoom controls only.

The ZR series employs the bottom-loading cassette design seemingly calculated to irritate tripod users.

The menu structure is fairly typical for this class of camcorder. Some frequently used options--shutter speed, white balance, and wind screen--fall under Camera Setup and Audio Setup, though they'd be more convenient if you could pull them up with a single button press as you can the scene modes. In fact, you can't launch the menus at all while you're recording, which exacerbates the inconvenience.

In addition to providing some interesting in-camera effects, the ZR65MC lets you mix stills from the SD card with video and offers stitch assist for creating panoramas.

A casual shooter will find all of the important features here, as well as extras such as an SD/MMC slot for still and MPEG video capture, a bundled remote control, analog pass-through for dubbing from old tapes, in-camera special effects, an external microphone jack, and an accessory shoe for mounting a video light.

The ZR65MC offers numerous programmed scene modes, including high-shutter-speed Sports, blurred-background Portrait, Spotlight, and Sand And Snow. (We tested the last one extensively during the recent New York City blizzard.) It also provides Low-Light (a.k.a. color slow shutter) and Night modes.

Though shutter speed and white balance adjust automatically, you can manually select from six shutter speeds ranging from 1/60 of a second to 1/2,000 of a second, as well as choosing indoor, outdoor, or manual white-balance settings. Record Search comes in handy, as well; if you shoot a still image to tape before each recording session, the camcorder can use the shots as pseudoindex markers that you can jump to sequentially. Manual focus, exposure shift, and a panorama stitch-assist mode round out the set of useful capabilities.

If you're a decent videographer, you may never have to download your video to a PC for editing. The multitude of in-camera effects includes nine faders, nine special effects, and a Multi-Image Screen that creates a slow-frame-rate effect. For the most part, the effects are well implemented. Sepia looks entirely too red and Color Masking looks too cheesy, but Mirror and Cube come in handy for spicing up videos of stationary subjects, such as sleeping cats and babies.

Count on buying an extra high-capacity battery for this camcorder.

Even judging by its manufacturer-rated specs, the life of the included battery leaves something to be desired: it takes longer to charge it than to discharge it under the most forgiving circumstances. That's not true of the slew of optional batteries Canon offers. In practice, count on about 45 minutes to 1 hour of power, depending on how much you use the LCD and leave the camera in standby mode. Thankfully, the electronic viewfinder works well enough to use full-time if necessary. After 5 minutes in pause mode, the camera will power down automatically; unfortunately, that includes any time spent simply setting up your shots or selecting an effect.

The zoom operates very smoothly and quietly, and though the ZR65MC supplies digital zoom up to 400X, all you'll see at that level will be an abstract display of pixel noise. If you're going to use it at all, set it to stop at 80X. Better yet, don't use it: the 20X optical zoom should suffice to cover most situations. As with typical digital image-stabilization systems, once you get out past 15X or so, you'll start to notice the camera shake. We noticed no significant image degradation when we left it on during panning and zooming, though. Similarly, the autofocus works quickly enough but gets sluggish in dim light or low-contrast scenes. The EVF and LCD are sharp enough to use for focusing manually if necessary.

We like the stereo microphone and the quality of the 16-bit audio capture--you can also do 12-bit--though it may prove too omnidirectional for videographers who talk to themselves. The Wind Screen option did a pretty good job of blocking the sound of blizzard winds. Unfortunately, in quiet moments, the microphone picks up the whine of the tape transport motor. Most of the time, however, you won't notice it.

The ZR65MC delivers pleasant, reasonably saturated colors.

In outdoor light, the ZR65MC delivers very good video for its class--crisp, bright, and properly exposed, with respectable white balance. Granted, reds bloom, and you'll see purple fringing around high-contrast areas, but no more so than with competitors. However, under dim lights and indoors, the video comes out quite noisy, and the camcorder lacks the near-dark recording capabilities that Sony delivers in its camcorders via Night Shot mode.

Still-image quality is typical for a budget camcorder.

You can capture serviceable stills with the camcorder, though they're probably best viewed onscreen scaled down by at least 50 percent. The 680,000-pixel sensor naturally produces better images--at 447,000-pixel effective photo resolution--than the current crop of 340,000-pixel competitors, but that will change as competitors ship their new models. As it is, they're soft and fairly noisy.

Subpar low-light video quality limits the attraction of this camcorder.

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