Great little Camara
This is my first digital camcorder and so far so good. I'm very happy with it. Easy mode is great for beginners like my husband and kids. I love the auto mode where I have control of special effects etc..... I highly recommend and the price is pretty good.
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Very satisfied.
We got this because it is compatible with MAC and iMovies. We are very pleased with the quality of pictures and ease of use. Lots of features we haven't explored yet but it easily does the job. We handed it over to our 11 year old and she did a great job with it, even with unsteady hands.
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Decent camcorder overall
Pros
- Good video quality overall (resolution)
- Decent audio
- Decent manual controls
- Includes 16MB memory card
Cons
- Not so impressive low light performance (when compared to JVC 93US)
- Not very sleek design - old fashioned controls, lens cap and flaky control area caps
- Not very user-friendly menu
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Worked great until it broke only after 3.5 hours of use
It was a great little camera until it broke. On it's forth tape, about midway through it beeped with an error and then wouldn't eject the tape. Luckily we still had 2 months left in the warranty. Warranty repair was fast!
It was fixed and returned stating "Replaced capstan motor assy, fuse. Cleaned and adjusted tape path and torqued".
I researched the net after it happened and found it's a pretty common problem with canon camcorders. Not sure why I didn't find that info before I bought it with as much research as I did then. From what I've read, the cost to repair this problem once it's out of warranty is around two hundred.
It's still a great camera, but breaking after less than 4 hours is pretty sad. It also didn't have a rough life, we were using it to film our first child. We would take it out of it's case, film for awhile and it went right back in it's case, never left the house.
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Conon Elura review
Great camera, easy to operate and very compact as well as reliable.
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Needs a FireWire cable.
Consumer Reports recommends the Elura 80. It's a good camera at a great price. It's small, easy to use, light, and functional. It's inexpensive and overall a great buy.
If you plan to transfer content to a computer for editing, however, you should know that you need a FireWire cable that does not come with the camera. That little fact isn't really documented anywhere obvious, so I spent quite a few minutes trying (unsuccessfully) to get the content transferred via USB cable. So, buy one. And Canon, start including one!
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Beware of known problem - "Remove the Cassette"
I owned this camera for a short time. When it was working, it was a nice camcorder that took nice video and was pretty simple to use. However, after a few tapes, the tape started to eject no matter what I did and always displayed an error message "Remove the Cassette". I did some research online and was amazed to find how many people have experienced the same problem. The camera now no longer works because it will not accept any tapes. As soon as you try to put them in, it ejects them out with this error message. It sounds like Canon is not exactly easy to deal with on this issue and the problem is chronic and affects alot of MiniDV camcorders in it's line. This was my 2nd defective Canon DV camcorder in the last 2 years. I think I am staying away from Canon in the future - very bad experiences and the quality is very poor.
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