Canon XA20 Compact Full HD Camcorder, 20x Optical Zoom, WiFI, 3.5" Touch LCD, 24p Support

2014-01-23T19:00:00

I own a G10 and have used the XA10 and have been waiting for an upgrade for a while. I just bought the XA20 and at first glance the footage is much nicer than the old versions of the Vixia. Flying to a job I was going to, I went through the manual to see what new features I had to learn. The multitude of frame rates was a bit confusing as some only shoot in MP4. Now for me getting the exposure right is paramount (I see so much blown out footage around) so I tried to find the waveform monitor (histogram) that was with the zebra settings on both the other cameras. On the XA20 it wasn't there, so I thought it must be a great new feature of the custom buttons, so you can flip it on and off with out having to delve into the menu each time. But no, Canon have seen fit to remove it !!!!! Really they have removed such an important feature and now all you have are zebras to get the correct exposure. Also they have a handy reply button, great no more switching to the media mode and back to camera mode, each time to view your last take. Well Canon saw fit to just show the last 3secs of it. So its as near as useless, if like me you leave editing handles, when someone has walked through frame or after a pan, etc, there is nothing going on in the last 3 secs of the clip and the camera is even showing you that view in camera mode. Why would you design a reply that doesn't show the whole or at least the last 10-15secs of a clip? Over all the size is great and its nice to remove the handle and the quality is good. But for the lack of WFM/histogram I had to take it back. It was the only way (especially when shooting in bright sun) to get the right exposure. Canon have why take away Pro features???

DANIEL B.

2013-08-13T21:00:00

It's a good small camera, with nearly all of the features a full sized pro camera has.

Charlie