Canon HG21

The basics

The Canon HG21 is a High-Definition camcorder capable of shooting 45 hours of Full-HD (1929 x 1080) video footage to its 120 GB hard disk drive. Fitted with a 2.7-inch LCD, it also comes with a Canon HD Video Lens with 12x optical zoom, a 3.3MP Canon Full HD CMOS sensor, and a powerful DIGIC DV II processor.

The good

Thanks to its capacious 120GB hard drive, this camcorder is able to squirrel away a massive amount of footage: about 45 hours of hi-def video, to be precise. You can also choose to squeeze your content onto an SDHC card - handy if you’ve got a card slot-carrying DVD or Blu-ray player capable of playing back AVCHD footage.

Movies can be captured at an awesomely sharp full HD resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels) at either 50 or 25 frames per second, then shoveled onto your PC for editing, or viewed directly on an HD ready TV hooked up via HDMI or component video cable.

The bad

The latter is supposed to give footage a more film-like, cinematic sheen (cinecameras shoot at 24 frames per second), but doesn’t really make much of a difference in our opinion. The HG21 is also wallet-emptying expensive, even by HD camcorder standards.

The bottom line

It’s certainly pricey, but the HG21’s lightweight, compact build, huge hard disk drive and superb hi-def-capturing abilities make it an appealing prospect for any well-heeled home movie maniac.