Canon Elura 50 Mini DV camcorder
I purchased the Canon
Elura 50
Mini DV consumer camcorder from Future Shop in June 2003 for $1200.
CDN., but I will be returning it. This is an extremely tiny camcorder,
but that small size is just about the only exceptional feature of
this camcorder. The small size seems to come at the expense of specifications
(not good in low light, limited optical zoom & not very battery
efficient) & serious compromises in picture quality. I found
this unit to take poor quality video compared with Mini DV units
half it's price. Unless you have money to burn & require an
ultra small camcorder, I would recommend against buying this unit.
I am impressed that Canon made it so small, but disappointed that
Canon couldn't incorporate better quality in this unit.
- Bright lights caused significant vertical streaking in the picture.
- Colors were dull & almost never very vivid regardless of
type of lighting (daylight, incandescent, or florescent). A low
contrast scene looked the best, but even then colors weren't fully
saturated. This was not the fault of the analogue output encoder,
this was the fault of the digital 1/6" CCD imager.
- Colors look especially awful (subtle & wrong colors) under
florescent lighting, which seems to indicate that the automatic
white balance doesn't work very well under florescent lighting.
- The low light capability was not very good at all & picture
looked grainy. Even the low light "Night" mode with
slowed shutter speed still required a minimum of 2.4 lux (the
Canon Optura is 0.5 lux).
- This camcorder was much worse than average in my opinion for
handling contrasty & semi-contrasty scenes.
- When checking the brightness luma levels on a waveform monitor,
this camcorder output levels to about 110 IRE & made no attempt
to keep levels down to legal 100 IRE levels.
- Plenty of black levels went below the NTSC legal pedestal limit
of 7.5 IRE.
- As with all consumer level camcorders, there was no highlight
compression circuitry, so details in bright areas are easily clipped.
- The built in stereo microphone did not pick up very well a person
talking at normal volume five feet away in a quite environment.
Wind noise was excessive, though there is an electronic wind filter
in the menu which I didn't use because it cuts clarity of audio.
- The optical zoom is only 10X but it worked well enough (The
Canon Optura 10 has a 16X optical zoom & the ZR65MC has a
20X optical zoom). There is a 40X & 400X digital zoom which
is completely useless once you start zooming well into the digital
range because it uses such a small part of the imager & the
picture looks very soft like it's out of focus. Fortunately you
can turn the digital zoom off in the menu. In my opinion, digital
zooms are mostly a worthless feature (especially in the higher
magnification range), thrown in to impress the consumer who doesn't
realize the compromise in quality that comes with digital zoom.
- To view the LCD screen in proper contrast, you must tilt it
up. Looking straight on doesn't give the correct contrast.
- The time code on the tape resets each time there is a piece
of unrecorded tape where you haven't QED it up to the last recorded
piece. This makes it very difficult to locate a scene by time
code later.
- The NTSC analogue output width is slightly wider than NTSC specifications.
- I thought the picture looked a bit soft most of the time.
- The electronic image stabilization helped some, but I far prefer
OPTICAL image stabilization (not on this unit) that Canon is famous
for having pioneered.
- The unit does come with A/V, S-Video & a USB cable but for
some strange reason it isn't equipped with a firewire IEEE 1394
cable for digital input & output to a computer, though it
does have the firewire connection port on the camcorder.
- Battery charging is not done on the camera, but by a separate
charger that worked well, so if you have an extra battery, you
can continue shooting while the first battery is charging. An
extra NB-2L battery is good for about a hour & is $80. CDN.
This model camcorder is more energy hungry than other Canon camcorders
(4.4 Watts minimum compared to the 2.9 Watts of the Canon ZR65MC),
so batteries don't last quite as long. A larger battery is available
& recomended.
By Doug Hembruff.
Last updated June 28, 2003
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