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Write a review of the Canon MV630i! Please share your experiences to help other people choose the product that's best for them. This is a review site, not a forum, so please don't just ask questions. Please do not use swear words or offensive language, and please, no advertising! Reviewed by Hemantha on 06-01-2004
Pros: 20x optical zoom lens, manual focus, programmed scene modes, manual white balance setting, analogue and digital input capability, digital animation mix, Night mode, lots of scene transition effects, colour EVF Cons: No USB streaming, lack of colour saturation, noisy under low light situation, lack of low light illumination lamp I bought it for #400 from Dixons about one week ago. This is a tiny beast that fits to my hand very well though functionally it is an average camcorder. I compared the video quality against an old Sharp digital camcorder (MiniDV) and found that Canon MV630i is a little inferior. As expected, tiny CCD of 0.8M resolution produce lots of noise and it is more visible under low light. Night mode however, reduces this noise but trailing artefacts makes the video unnatural. I noticed that most low-cost camcorders have this problem. Colours are not up to Canon Digital Camera level. Colours not saturated enough, especially under low-light conditions. It is unfortunate that I could not find any method to increase the colour saturation. Digital camera function is useless, unless you need them for on computer viewing. Still, under low light, photos looks grainy, even on the camcorder monitor itself. However, panorama capability might be an added advantage. Still I didn\'t have opportunity to check this function, though. Lack of USB streaming support is the biggest disadvantage. Until I open the printed manual, I was not aware about this big void. USB port is only used to communicate with the SD card. If you want to transfer your recording to a PC, or you want to use it as a web cam, you have to use the DV terminal. But the DV interface card (IEEE 1394) and the cable must be purchased separately since this interface is still not a standard feature for most of the computers. The other problem I noticed was that it fails to focus properly occasionally, under low light conditions. I am not aware that other cameras also behave similarly under this condition. Good news is that the manual focus facility helps in such situations. For those who do not like (or do not have facilities) to process video on a computer, digital animation mixing capability will be very much useful to enhance their video. Same function allows us to decorate the video with pre-prepared objects such as captions and borders. I was not able to test in camera scene transition effects and therefore I do not comment on this matter now. Finally, I like this camera, which does not charge for fancy things like tough sensitive LCD screens. Big optical zoom lens is more useful instead.
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Canon MV630i

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Canon MV630i Consumer Reviews (1 review)

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