Canon HF-R16

Canon's HF-R16 is a high-definition camcorder that sells for less than £400.  With its stripped-back interface and attractive design, it's aimed at film-makers who want a lightweight camera.

Handling

It's hard to get any simpler than the HF-R16, with its power button to fire things up and a big, red button to start recording.  You don't need to look for the controls: everything's where you'd expect.  You can see what you're filming and play back your videos on an LCD screen which is controlled by a basic, physical joystick.  The rather average 2.7'' screen screen has a low resolution of just 112 000 pixels, but at this price, it's hard to quibble.  The outside has a fairly polished look, and comes in several different glossy colours, including red, black and silver.  The one we reviewed had a bright red exterior.

The LCD screen might be average, but there's no doubting how easy to use this camera is.

Video Quality

This camcorder produces very reasonable HD video using its small 1/5.5'' CMOS sensor, reproducing colours accurately and with plenty of detail.  Sensitivity is what lets it down, and the problem is not so much that the camcorder fails to pick out details in the dark, but that electronic noise quickly overtakes the video.  You don't need to do any configuration yourself though, because the most appropriate scene mode is chosen from the 31 available so that the settings match your circumstances (indoors, outdoors or night shots for example).

The lens starts with a fairly narrow viewing angle of 40 mm, but the optical zoom goes all the way to 20x, or 800 mm, which is very powerful.  The next questions is why the longest zoom lenses are always on the cheapest cameras ... we suspect it's to seduce new customers.

Face detection optimises the settings to bring together up to 35 faces in one shot.

Video is recorded as a AVCHD file with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels with a 25p progressive scan if you're looking for a 'film' look.  The camcorder itself only has 8 GB of memory, so you can only capture just over an hour of high quality (17 Mbps) video or up to three hours in low quality (1440 x 1080 pixels at 5 Mbps).  The HF-S16 has an SDHC slot, though, and recording automatically switches to your memory card when the internal memory is full.  There's a 'pre-recording' mode that uses a cache that continually stores the last three seconds of video so you  don't miss anything.  It's not a new invention, but it's still useful.

You can work for a little more than an hour using the battery, which isn't bad, and it can be recharged in the camcorder itself.  All of the inputs and outputs are under flaps at the back, and include HDMI and component video out for your HD TV, composite video for older TVs and USB for copying your videos and photos onto a computer.