Great Camera, Battery Sucks

Author's Rating:

Pros: Great Images, Very Small, Easy to use

Cons: Batteries only last one hour.

The Bottom Line: 
Highly recommend it for home and family buyers AND budget buyers.

Author's Review
I bought this camera to replace an old Panasonic VHS-C camera. After reading many reviews over at www.camcorderinfo.com (a great site BTW), I decided to save a few bucks and get the ZR 200 instead of the 300. The light seemed useless to me and I already had a SD card.

The ZR 200 outperforms our old Panasonic in every way. Very happy with this camera. I've been using it mostly in "easy" mode. I did try out the wide-screen feature, and MAN was it cool! I filmed a concert band at a local community college, in low light, on a ti-pod with lots of panning and zooming. It really did a great job. It looked like a freakin' documentary!

You will read lots of reviews complaining about motor noise. These are greatly exaggerated. I've used it to tape the audio of my wife's sonogram (fetal doppler sounds) in a very quiet doctor's office and it worked perfectly, no motor noise.

This is a consumer level camera, and as such performs very well for casual capturing. Kicks butt for home movies, low light concerts. Real pros might want to consider spending more.

One bummer, the battery really sucks. It lasts about one hour, so you'll want to get another one, or do what I do and plug it in whenever you can.

One little tip: You must hold the focus button down! You will read complaints of slow manual focus times, and I noticed the same thing, until I HELD DOWN THE FOCUS BUTTON. Manual focus is very snappy.