Canon out with new camcorders

On Friday, the 18th April and for the first time ever, I was at a press conference thanks to the awesome Brian and Tania of Ogilyv for remembering how much I love Canon products. Many of the pictures and videos in this blog itself are captured with the Ixus and 350D.

It was a classy event from the start at the regal Asian Civilisations Museum, being ushered in by the smartly dressed security guard to going up the charmingly vintage staircase. And then being greeted by a bevvy of pretty ladies in red dresses.

Soon-after, I reached the hall where the event was held. There were already a number of people mingling around.

It was kind of a strange experience and somewhat daunting being surrounded by editors of credible magazines and newspapers. Whereas I was representing the bloggers. Nevertheless, I tried to be as sociable as I could be and just smiled at the people that I saw.

I spotted out Tania who was sitting down – she was very recognizable with her short spiky hair. Lynette, whom I met earlier, swooped in and introduced me to her.

Tania was friendly and really cool we chatted briefly till the emcee stood up on the platform and announced the start of the event.

It was glitzy! It started off with Mr Andrew Koh, the director of Canon Singapore explaining about the features of the new camcorders. AND THEN there were 5 extremely tall catwalk models strutting around with the different camcorders. They were so tall that I had to crane my neck trying to look at them.

But the cherry on top of the cake was when Andrew announced the ambassador for their camcorder was what made me nearly gasp out loud. It was Wong Li Lin! I was so floored to see her. In front of me was an acclaimed actress! I throughly enjoyed her performance in Leap Years.

Unfortunately, she slipped out of the event pretty quickly that I don’t think that anyone had a chance to interact with her.

At the end of the event, the guests were invited to try out the new camcorders. I had a ball of a time, having a hands on session with the 5 different camcorders – The HF 10, HF 100, FS 11, FS 10 and FS 100.

Personally, I thought that it was rather impressive. All five of the models were lightweight and small. I could seriously stuff all the five models in my handbag and run away with it.

It took me about 15 mins of fiddling to get used to the interface but after that, it was relatively easy to use. It uses a mini joystick rather than a touch screen which would probably make it preferable for people who do not like to smudge their screens.

Having been used to working with camcorders using mini-DV tapes, I liked how it uses internal built in memory which makes it faster to transfer to the computer as well as to a SD-card directly.

And ultimately what was the best feature of the camera was the video and audio quality. I did a quick test and recorded on my SD card. It was so clear that you could see every pores on my face. Oh my!

Screenshot from video. No photoshop edit apart from resize and additional text

I’m amazed why many the other journalists did not grope the camera display models as much. They were like just touching it, flipping it around and thats it. I guess that was great cos I had ALL the time to examine and grope the equipment in close detail. I was most excited.

Here is a quick video clip of the event :

And my final conclusion?

I love it! I want one! It makes the video from my camera seem so dinky now. Canihascanoncamcorder? Please?