I'm fairly happy with the Canon FS200. It can records in widescreen mode, making videos I upload to Youtube fill the entire player rather than having black columns on the sides. The battery lasts about 3 hours, and if you have a 16 GB card in there, you'll get over 3 hours of footage, so it works out well. I like the settings available within the menus. They are generally easy to access and provide a lot of control over the footage. The zoom is very nice, but just make sure you turn off digital zoom. You don't need it anyway. One of the biggest selling points for me was the external microphone jack, which in this price range is extremely rare. But it's not a perfect device. First of all, it's not HD. And even though is widescreen, that's not the same. Don't try to fool yourself into thinking it is. The quality just can't match up to an HD device. Secondly, it occasionaly drop pixels from the video. I don't know exactly how this happens, as the video looks fine when played on the FS200, but when I transfer the files to the computer, there are often glitches. And the overall color seems to worsen when transfering to the computer as well. I thought this might just be my color calibration, but the footage looks the same on other computers as well. It's as if the colors just became darker and more dull, often with more digital noise. Overall, I'm glad I bought this. It's easy to use, generally outputs good footage, and was at a great price. I recommend it.

brochris

Nokomis, IL

My family bought this canon fs 200 camcorder about two yeara ago and I love it! We had an older vhs camcorder we had for for a number of years, but it was time for a change. We had to get with the new technology these days. And I'm glad we made the change and switched . I love that the canon camcorder is so compact, that you can take it pretty much and fit just about anywhere like in a coat pocket for example. I picture quality is excellent for standard definition camcorder.And the zoom, WOW its great. When you zoom in, from far away its like the object is right in front of you. Filming is easy, and the setup was a breeze, compared to other camcorders I've owned in the past, its light weight, which is great. It doesn't was a ton like the old big vhs camera years ago! The battery life is excellent. so you can film longer without worrying about the battery dying on you. The image stabilizer is great.Not to mention the 32 GB of hard drive to record too if you sd card is full. Plus excellent picture quality. Overall a great camcorder A+++++

jboissy16

Hooksett, NH

We are a small family that travels a lot. We wanted a camera to record our children as they grow up, that would be subtle as we travel and that would be small enough to not add much to our large load. The Canon FS200 is perfect. We have gotten great quality videos out of our camcorder. It picks up sound well and has a clear image. The LCD screen is small but easy to see and the functions are easy to use. The buttons are small but work well. Ours has the 2000x digital zoom and does and excellent job. We are able to smoothly zoom in and out while recording and get the image we were hoping for. From our experience, we would recommned that you use Canon's software to get the recorded video to the computer but don't use Canon's software to manipulate the videos on your computer. Our experience has ended with wide video images when using Canon's software to manipulate the videos.  Overall we would definitely recommend this camcorder and it was well worth the price.

SweetLittleWomen

Belgrade, MT