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The upright design of the Canon Optura 600 ($1100 as of 5/2/06) means that it's the most portable camcorder we looked at: It would fit into a coat pocket or a small purse without causing too much of a bulge.

But handling this camcorder is a bit of a mixed bag, and one-handed operation proved problematic. People with relatively small hands will have some trouble holding the Optura 600 and working the controls with one hand. The camcorder may tend to slip when you use your thumb to reach for the record button, and this can lead to shaky video in the first couple of seconds of shooting. The hand strap is also oddly placed--bracing the camcorder properly can be difficult unless you use both hands to hold it.

These gripes aside, the Optura 600 is easy to use. While many camcorders assign multiple purposes to buttons (or throw the functions into an on-screen menu), this one has a good selection of buttons, including a few beneath the LCD screen that control playback, and three around the mode dial that control the on-screen menu, the built-in light, and the audio settings. The mode dial's spots for the nine shooting modes (including aperture and shutter priority, as well as modes for low light and sports) make it much easier to switch among modes. You can access six more scene modes through the scene setting on the dial by using the nearby jog dial, which also provides a handy way to change settings such as shutter speed with your thumb. Though all these buttons may confuse novice users, they do provide quick access to frequently used settings and controls.

The 2.5-inch LCD screen is bright (though rather hard to see in direct sunlight), but it isn't a wide-screen model. The camcorder can shoot in a 16:9 wide-screen mode and has a wide-screen CCD sensor, but the video is letterboxed (two black strips are added at the top and bottom of the screen), which makes it a little hard to see. The 10X optical zoom lens has a shorter range than some of the other cameras' lenses have, but it's more than adequate for general use. The battery life of 94 minutes is a little on the short side.

The Optura 600's 0.36-inch image sensor is larger than those in some less-expensive camcorders (for example, the $400 Elura 100 has a 0.25-inch sensor), which should make for better video quality. However, we didn't see much improvement in our tests (the Optura 600 scored only slightly higher than the Elura 100). The Optura 600's video didn't look bad, but it lacked the vivid colors of video shot by the Panasonic PV-GS500, which has a 0.21-inch sensor.

The small microphone on the top of the Optura 600 recorded clear, bright sound, but its location is problematic. When the camera operator uses the viewfinder, the sound that person makes can overwhelm everything else, because the microphone is located right above the viewfinder.

The Optura 600 has a number of nice touches, though. One is a surprisingly bright LED light on the front of the camera, for taking videos in dark locations. It's perhaps a bit too bright: If you turn it on in a dark room, you'll likely get complaints, and videos with people squinting from the sudden light. The camcorder also took sharp still images with good color, recording them to an SD Card. The 4-megapixel images can also be captured at the same time as video, so you can get the best of both worlds. Though many recent point-and-shoot cameras have resolutions of 8 or more megapixels, 4 megapixels is good for a camcorder; some models we tested offer a resolution of only 1 megapixel or less.

At $1100, the Canon Optura 600 is one of the most expensive camcorders we reviewed--you're paying a large premium for the small size. Nonetheless, it provides a lot of features, delivers reasonably good video quality, and can double as a decent still camera.

Richard Baguley