The Canon Vixia hf200 HD

There was a time when creating real, professional quality video meant buying a real, professional quality camcorder. If you wanted to really make an indie film or shoot great looking weddings, you were looking at a camera that cost about as much as a new car. With these tapeless HD cameras like the canon vixia hf200 HD, that’s no longer the case. You can now get a great, high quality camera for the cost of what is essentially a toy camera.

The hf200 is the evolution of the hf100, and if you’re wondering if it comes from good breeding stock, well… The hf10 was actually used on the set of Crank: High Voltage. So not only CAN you get great, professional quality footage with this consumer grade camera, but others have already done so, and released the results to a major audience.

And of course, the only real difference between the HF10 and 100? The HF10 has an internal memory. Other than that, they’re essentially the same camera. At the time they made that film, the cameras cost them one thousand USD. Since, the price has dropped considerably.

The camera records directly onto an SDHC card which, at sixteen gigs, can hold around two hours of video at the highest quality settings. This means that if you’re just recording some stuff for fun and don’t care about quality, you can get hours upon hours upon hours of footage with just one card.

It really is designed for the indie filmmaker, especially those that want something light weight and easy to use to record some fast paced footage. It comes with an external microphone jack so that you can attach a boom mic, as well as a headphone jack for playback or to make sure you know what’s being picked up, an accessory shoe, built in neutral density filter, and a threaded lens barrel, so you can switch out lenses to your heart’s content.

The only draw backs are a lack of a view finder (just a viewing screen) and no focus ring. But, if you know how to work around that, you’ll hardly notice that they’re not there.

If you just want to get into the specs, they’re quite nice. You have a 3.2 megapixel CMOS sensor, the lens speed goes at F/1 8-3.0. The filter diameter is a nice thirty seven mm, 12x optical zoom, optical image stabilizer, two point seven inch LCD screen, and without the battery, it only weighs about three hundred eighty g.

It films in 1080p. It looks good enough on the big screen, so it’ll look just fine on your HDTV. It really is exactly the camera you’ve been looking for if you want to make your own movies and you don’t want to go through the whole Hollywood process. The fact is that indie film is on its way back, and we mean true indie film, not those twenty million dollar projects released by New Line. Real, true indie is coming back, and it’s all thanks to cameras like the canon vixia hf200 hd.