Time for you have been framed. (Canon MV650i)

Member Name: free_peace_sweet

Product:	Canon MV650i
Date:	15/07/06 (279 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Small compact & excellent zoom

Disadvantages: Poor lin ow lighting & tape noise

The Canon MV650i is part of the MV600 range. It's the top model and is packed with loads of features.

It's recording methood is Mini DV which produce fantastic quality film.

The camera itself is very small and compact and very lightweight. It's silver in colour with light up buttons which you have a choice of colours to pick from to personalise it. The camera has a crystal clear 2.5" LCD screen to view or a moveable viewfinder. The Microphone is based at the front end of the camera and tapes are loaded via the bottom. One bad point about being bottom loading.

The camera has numerous features.

It boosts a 22x optical zoom plus 440 digital zoom. The 22x optical gets you real close to the action the 440x digital zoom isn't worth using unless you absolutley need to.

a wide angle lense included which does come in hand for those closer shots. It simply screws in the front of the lens.

A photo function facility. The pictures are useless and low quality but if you bump the settings up it will produce very good quality 6x4 prints. Pictures can be stored to the DV tape or a SD Card or Multi Media Card.

Image stabilizer. This actually works quite well and does help when your hand is a little on the shakey side.

It comes with a mini spotligh and i mean mini. This is the cameras downfall in low light situation the camera fails to produce the same high quality pictures and film. The film is quite grainey in low light.

Lithium battery - lasts around 2 hours with the one supplied although extra power batteries delivering 9.5 hours can be bought. Charge/AC adaptor included charges pretty quick.

Records in stero sound however the microphone does pick up the transport noise from the tape. easily removed on the PC though.

This camera has built in effects so you can merge films and perform transitions. i haven't used this feature much as i generaly use a PC.

The camera has various preset options to film. In auto is normally fine but sometimes you just need those extra features.

The camera has an accesory shoe for an extra light to be added its abot 60 quid though and a microphone.

A remote control is included with all the features of the actual camera which can be used from quite a distance away.

For ease of use this camera is simple within an hour you can film like a pro. it's simply one button to switch on and off, one to stop start recording and a little toggle button for the zoom. the camera is auto focus or manual focus.

The camera has various connections most are supplied apart from a firewire cable (i purchased one from a pc component centre for £10 plus a firewire card) for the DV Out. the connections are DV out, DV in, Analogue out/in USB out/in. so it's very simple to connect to a PC or TV or video. Simple software is supplied for the PC but there are loads of cool programs out there. Mine luckily had a version of Pinnacle studio 8 bundled in FOC so check the box. Transfering video to PC really will depend on the software you are going to use with this camera.

Overall I purchased this camera as i wanted something cheap easy to use MIni DV that i could connect upto my PC for editing.Ii paid £399 from wilkinson cameras and proves to be good value against its competitors.

Am i happy with it? Yes, it's picture quality zoom and ease of use is excellent.

Things that let it down are the tape noise and poor qulaity in low lighting conditions

Problems i have personally had with it? after 12 months my sensor packed in so i could no longer film with it. After doing a search on the net this seemed a common fault. I had mine repaired at a whopping £150. I expected more life than 12 months from this product.

Summary: Great but not as robust as i hoped

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