Serious disappointment

Author's Rating:

Pros: Although of absolutely no functional value, colored buttons will entertain very small children

Cons: Poor picture, focus, color saturation and hue, non-existent customer service. cumbersome recording interface.

The Bottom Line: 
Buy something else

Author's Review
I owned a digital-8 for a long time and finally figured it was time to make the transition to Mini-DV. I had heard good things about the ZR series and was especially intrigued by the 22x optical zoom of the ZR70MC. Also, transferring my old digital-8 and VHS tapes made its line-in recording ability a great plus. To my dismay, there is no way that I have been able to figure out nor is there any documentation on how to record - except with the remote. Even that is a less-than-simple process of pressing play, then pause, then record/pause to put it into a record mode, then pause again to actually start the dubbing process. Secondly, there has got to be a better way to manually focus than pressing a combination transport/focus - I think its the pause button, and then using the little menu dial to rack focus while trying to get the focus to stop at just the right focus spot. A simple focus ring or dial would have been a nice feature. Then there is the auto-focus. A 22x optical zoom is of little value when anything past about 8x continuously pulses back and forth as though it just can't seem to lock on to anything. This happens on stationary objects with no movement in the frame and at all light levels. There's more. The color is flat. If the ZR70 was a 3 chip camera, I would think one or more of the chips had failed. The hue is just plain off. Even my old VHS tapes look clearer, more colorful, and more accurate. And compared to my Digital-8, well there is no comparison. I have seen other mini-DV camcorders and many of them, including some from Canon, look beautiful. Unfortunately, given my experience with Canon service and support, I don't think I would recommend them either based on the possibility you might end up with Lemon. I have tried every possible setting on the camera and all are just different variations of bad. Even in bright sunlight, the camera looks grainy like it might in low light. Maybe I just got a bad apple out of the bunch. A camcorder lemon if you will. But contacting Canon resulted only in an automated reply and a reference to the troubleshooting knowledge base. Found nothing there and a detailed message to their tech support team resulted - again - in an automated reply but no follow-up. I have spent so much time trying to resolve the issues, I fear the warranty will expire before problems are addressed. If you are looking fro a good camcorder... Keep looking.