Canon USA DC210 DVD Camcorder

Blessed with a very low price, the DC210 ($380 as of April 24, 2007) offers a fair number of features. It captured good, but not great, video in our lab tests. It won't double well as a camera, however, having earned a Poor in our tests for still image quality.

The DC210 comes festooned with a lot of buttons, which raises the bar for learning to use it, in part because some functions are duplicated. There are buttons under the LCD monitor, plus a joystick on the back, plus a mode switch (for selecting Program or Auto), a start/stop button for video, and a separate shutter button for taking photos. You can control the zoom, for example, with either the zoom lever atop the unit or the fast-forward and rewind buttons on the LCD's bezel. You have to operate from the LCD to start and stop playback, but you must use the joystick to jump between files. This arrangement means you can't accomplish certain tasks with one hand. Buttons on the upper left side of the housing let you access settings for various lighting scenarios and for white balance. The net effect is that you have a multitude of controls to try to control.

The camera's 35X optical zoom works extremely well, focusing very quickly when you stop zooming (you can zoom up to 5X when shooting stills). At its top setting, the adjustable zoom speed, which has three settings, is among the fastest we've seen.

A few nice video effects are built in, including one called Art that applies a solarizer filter and produces an effective washed-out color scheme. The night setting works quite well in low light if you can avoid jittery movement (a potential problem due to the slow shutter speed). A Bright mode for the LCD monitor is handy when you're shooting outdoors in strong sunlight, but the manual warns you that this setting will drain the battery faster.

Though still photos weren't impressive, the DC210 does let you convert captured images into 3-second MPEG-2 files that you can insert into your movies as scenes. Also, when you're using camera (capture) mode, the DC210 permits quick review of the previous movie you shot, though the audio doesn't play. The camcorder has no headphone jack, by the way.

The DC210's Quick Start feature should be named Standby, because in this mode the camcorder comes to life in about 2 seconds.

Finalizing discs on this model took about 6.5 minutes for a standard DVD-R disk that's about half full. Battery life in our tests was a respectable 109 minutes, but you have to plug in the AC adapter to finalize a disc.

There's no USB port in addition to the AV-out, so you can't transfer individual files to a PC for editing or make a copy of the DVD in the camcorder using a DVD burner hooked up to your PC. Of course, this won't matter if you don't plan to edit your footage.

As long as you don't object to having to master many controls, this camcorder has genuine appeal, thanks to its low price and powerful zoom.

John Poultney