A Look At The Canon Vixia Hf200 Hd

By Joseph Clayton

If you consider just ten years ago, it was impossible for a true indie filmmaker to make a film on their own terms without spending an arm and a leg on a good, professional quality camera. Once you got a good digital camcorder, you could film for hours and not spend any cash on film, but you'd probably have mortgaged your home to get the camera in the first place. Well, things have changed. Today, good, high quality cameras like the canon vixia hf200 hd can be bought for the price of... Well, a fancy dinner for five.

The hf200 is the successor to the hf100, and if you haven't heard much about this camera, well, it's not one of the most well known, but they actually used several cameras from this line on the film Crank: High Voltage. If you saw that movie in theaters, you would never have known that they used anything but the most expensive cameras around. It's really a great looking film.

The cameras used in that film, the HF10, were different from the HF100 series only in that they used internal memory as opposed to cards. Otherwise, they're really the same camera. When they made that movie, the cameras cost one thousand USD on their budget, but since, the price has dropped.

The HF200 is tapeless, recording onto SDHC cards. A four gig card can hold a half hour of footage at the highest setting, and a sixteen gig card can hold two full hours. So if you set the quality a little lower, you can get hours and hours and hours and hours of footage with just a single card. If you want to make a real MOVIE, you can film all the footage you need on just a few cards.

The camera is really perfect for the indie filmmaker. Even if you're not interested in the movie, go watch Crank: High Voltage just to see what you can do with these cameras. The camera includes an external mic jack so any boom mic you want to attach, you can attach it. You get a headphone jack for playback and to hear what the camera's picking up, you get an accessory shoe, a built in neutral density filter, and the lens barrel is threaded for extra lenses.

If there's one draw back... Well if there are two: No view finder, just the LCD screen, and there's no focus ring. But, you can work around that pretty easily and most people could care less.

The specs are quite nice for such a cheap camera: 3.2 megapixel CMOS sensor, F/1 8-3.0 lens speed, thirty seven millimeter filter diameter, twelve x optical zoom, optical image stabilizer, the LCD screen is a nice two point seven inches, and if you take the battery out, the whole thing only adds up to eighty g's in weight.

The camera films at 1080p, which creates a really nice, crisp, clean look with none of the muddiness you expect from the cheaper cameras. It really is, through and through, THE camera for the modern generation of DIY filmmakers. If you don't want to go through Hollywood, if you want to make your own movies on your own terms... Well, indie film is really making a comeback, and it's all thanks to the affordable nature of equipment and technology like the canon vixia hf200 hd.

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