Canon Vixia HG21

At the price of $1099 if you get a good deal, you would expect an outstanding quality to blow your head off. This is not exactly the case with the Canon HG21. It’s a good, solid, established model for the prosumer that somehow manages to justify that price. But reality tells us that there are way less expensive cameras that do the trick better in terms of quality.

At least you can shoot up to 45 hours of video and store them in the internal 120GB hard drive, and you can switch from cinema 24p mode to 30p progressive mode, an option that makes the difference between heavier videos and ready for Youtube videos, but you get to keep the same 1920×1080 resolution. Neat, huh?

Canon Vixia HG21 features

You can shoot videos at 1920×1080 at 60fps but there’s something that completely sets it apart from other cameras. That is the RGB color filter that makes the images as crisp and vibrant as ever. You can appreciate this in daylight or outdoors filming. The 12x high definition video lens avoids takes with low resolution. You will get the 100% of quality wherever you point this camera at.

But I can’t say the same with indoors or low light settings. It’s grainy at best and some mini cameras outdo it in this aspect. What was Canon thinking here? Hopefully it has a powerful incorporated light that makes up for it, but sometimes isn’t enough.

It has a microphone input with the option of graduating the volume, the background noise level, so you can adjust it depending on your filming conditions. You can complement it with an additional headphone that lets you know the quality of sound being recorded in advance.

For such an expensive price, it’s too modest that it can take 3.1 megapixel stills when there are way cheaper cameras that can take up to 5 megapixel pics, unless you consider that you can take photos at 4:3 or at 16:9. But it’s really irrelevant.

Canon Vixia HG21 downsides

You really need to spend more money buying spare batteries because the ones that come in the box barely last 90 minutes, unless you manage your way charging it constantly with the AC adapter, but that takes away a lot of flexibility, doesn’t it?

I guess this is the case in which you see that buying an expensive camera to get the best quality is not always the solution. Sure, you would get a more established quality than if you buy a $149 camera. But sometimes there are certain models that fall in the middle and for less money you can get that ideal camera that doesn’t even fail in dark settings.