Quick Review Camcorders : Canon ZR200

The Canon ZR series also should be praised for overcoming the horrible performance of last year’s ZR series. Last year, Canon’s ZRs performed fine under bright light levels, but once the lights dimmed, the camcorders showed tremendous noise, grain, and color loss. While this year’s camcorders aren’t perfect, they do show tremendous improvement from last year, putting the Canon entry level camcorder back in the market.

“But what are the differences among the ZR line itself, and how are we to distinguish between the ZR100, 200, and 300?” you ask. Well, there aren’t that many differences. Price is the obvious difference, but we need to make sure the difference in price is worth the difference in features. This is sometimes not the case, as it may be in the case of the ZRs. For instance, the only differences between the ZR200 and the ZR300 is the inclusion of an auto assist lamp, an 8MB SD card, and a .6x wide angle attachment. Now depending on the user these features could be worth the money, but we don’t think so. Whether or not you need the wide angle attachment is debatable, but if you really need one, you wouldn’t be buying an entry level camcorder in the first place. The auto assist lamp is rarely used, and chances are if you were planning on recording lots of stills with the ZR300, you’d buy a bigger SD card anyway.

So, now that we’ve cleared things up, what does the ZR200 offer? Well, while the camcorder doesn’t have better automatic controls than comparable Sonys or better manual controls than comparable Panasonics, it does okay, offering some manual controls that can be accessed relatively easy. Manual control over focus, exposure, shutter speed, and white balance are available. Unfortunately, exposure adjustments are only offsets (+/-6), and there are no numerical indicators to help you judge focus. So then you’re left with shutter speed and white balance, both useful features, though I would have liked to see some slower shutter functions. These controls, as well as the camcorder’s menu system, are controlled using the camcorder’s jog dial. This is an okay method, definitely better than Sony’s touch screen, and definitely worse than Panasonic’s joystick control.

In fact, this jog dial contributes to a general handling problem on the ZR200. Aside from the camcorder’s VCR mode buttons, button placement is bad, and the jog dial is kinda tucked away and not exactly handy. The LCD screen is also horrible, solarizing badly when viewed from an angle. On the upside, the ZR series’ zoom toggles tie Sony’s as the best of the lower-end camcorder market.

The Canon ZR200 gives decent still performance, better than comparable JVCs, though not as good as Panasonics. It records stills at 1024 x 768 and 640 x 480.

All in all, the ZR200 is probably the best deal going right now in Canon’s ZR series. It provides video quality on par with the ZR300, includes the same still capabilities of the ZR300 (the ZR100 doesn’t have SD card compatibility), and spares you the gimmicky marketing ploys.

  Canon ZR200 Compared to the...