Review on Canon VIXIA R700 Camcorder Black by Shane Grosland

UPDATED 9/12/2016Excellent Specialized Video Camera! It's incredibly small, but not too small for my man hand. With the battery attached, it's a good weight and doesn't feel cheap at all. It took me a while to get the camera set up the way I wanted it. A lot of trial and error with different settings and presets, but ultimately I decided to leave this camera in the very reliable fully automatic mode, with a few tweaks to the advanced settings in the settings menu. I will pass these tips on to you below. Tips: > Disable 'Auto Slow Shutter', I've found that this causes the camera to slow down the shutter speed in dark scenes to compensate for low light, but this reduces the frame rate and the recording looks shaky and choppy. Works great when off, even in low light conditions. > Disable "Power on by LCD panel". Turning this off allows you to continue recording even if you close the display, and even start/stop recording without even opening the display. > Changing the zoom type to 57X gives you a slight advantage - wider field of view than 32X ( default setting), but this disables dynamic image stabilization and leaves you with standard IS. If you want a wider FOV then that's a compromise. > Turn on "Mirror image on LCD" this will mirror the image on the LCD when flipped for a selfie so your framing and movement will be natural to you feel >Plug in any headphones to monitor the audio you're recording in real-time. Even without pressing the record button, you hear exactly what the camera hears. This also works for watching and listening to videos stored on the SD card. Pros: + 1080p 60FPS video is smooth, with no frame drops or choppy segments. + The lens has a front thread for attaching filters and additional lenses. + Video quality is top notch. Cropped in decent light and acceptable in low light. + Image stabilization works great for portable devices, there are 3 different IS types for your situation. + The best fully automatic mode I've ever seen, it even tells you what it's doing, how it's doing it. (shows the IS mode when it changes for different situations and what kind of scene it's set up for)+ You can remove the battery and completely disconnect the camera from the wall charger for continuous recording for several days.+ If you like the If the battery runs out of battery power during recording, the camera will still save your video and will not damage the file. + The built-in microphone is pretty good, it records in stereo and does a good job of boosting the gain to reasonable levels. I believe it uses AGC or some form of dynamic compression. It even has different sound modes for things like speech, nature, or noise cancellation. And if you don't like the microphone, you can always plug in your own. It has built-in capabilities to record time-lapse videos at a set rate, saving hours of battery life and SD card space. I hooked up a cardioid dynamic mic and studio headphones to this camera at the same time and they performed exceptionally well. This camera should have a pretty good mic preamp as I could hear my voice loud and clear in the headphones in real time. However, if you connect a monaural microphone to this camera, you'll only get sound and monitor feedback through one earcup. You'll have to fix this afterwards or buy a mono-in to stereo-out adapter to fill both the L and R audio channels. Cons: Sometimes on rare occasions after a video longer than 10 minutes or a few short clips has been recorded . In quick succession, my VIXIA randomly overexposes and inserts frames into the shot, which appear as bright white flashes every 5-10 seconds during playback. This is often accompanied by multiple underexposed images appearing as dark flashes during playback. I reported this to Canon support but all they suggested was trying a different SD card or sending the camera in for warranty repair. I haven't decided what to do with it yet, if anything, but I'm curious if other VIXIA owners have had a similar issue. Danger. - No place to install a light or an external shotgun mic, the camera is so small it doesn't make sense anyway. - The face detection feature can cause more problems than it solves, often making the entire scene pulse uncontrollably. Focus when shooting indoors - No external charger included, you need to connect the camera to the wall directly. (although the battery is easy to remove) - The power input and cable is a proprietary connection, meaning you'll need to source replacement cables directly from Canon. - If you don't have enough light, your video will look grainy, low resolution and fuzzy. That's true of all cameras, though, so your expectations should be reasonable. The built-in microphone sounds great from the front, but when you speak from behind the camera, your voice sounds reverberant and muffled. I would recommend plugging in an external microphone if you plan to comment this way. - After reading the manual and searching the web, I still don't understand what "Show Help" is in Settings. I think this goes hand in hand with highlight priority mode, but if someone can explain that to me I'd love to hear it. This camera does not contain any software. I remember recently buying a Canon DSLR and it had all sorts of great tools for my PC including a licensed version of Adobe Lightroom. I'd love to see that kind of icing on this cake, but oh well. Thank you for reading. I would love to see your comments and appreciative votes.