Canon’s first hard disk-based AVCHD camcorder gets it mostly right, with a good level of features and the best image quality we’ve yet seen from the format.

Bring PC-based intelligence and automation to your home with this complete guide. It's cheap and easy to now have the 'Jetsons' house.

It may not be a looker, but in all other respects this Panasonic is a stunning camera

Refocusing on disc-related features makes Nero the top choice for optical disc authoring.

Canopus first made its name providing top-notch 3Dfx cards. Realising the deadly competitiveness and pace of that market, however, Canopus has moved on and repositioned itself as a company specialising in video editing.

Key improvements over the SD5 make this a still more enticing pocket HD camcorder prospect

Editing performance with HDV remains sluggish, but DV-editing ability is formidable.

A fully featured hard disk AVCHD camcorder with plenty of recording space

A fully featured hard disk AVCHD camcorder with plenty of recording space

A dinky AVCHD camcorder, with respectable video performance and a reasonable price.

Great image quality and plenty of enthusiast features for a very reasonable price

A great value camcorder that’s capable of some decent results.

Another big improvement, but this time it’s enough to make PowerDirector a worthy alternative to its mainstream rivals

Pocket-sized digital camcorders are becoming more capable all the time. We round up ten of the best

Packed with features and closer to Adobe Premiere Elements, CyberLink PowerDirector 8 is close, but still not close enough.

Vegas has a huge array of editing features for the money, plus powerful bundled DVD authoring.

Better HD image quality than you’d expect for such a small camcorder, but the price is still a little high.

Excellent features and performance, but it’s pricey and you need a suitably powerful PC to make the most of it.

With its limited editing features, it would be hard to see anyone choosing PowerDirector 5 over the Adobe, Pinnacle or Ulead competition.

There was a time when Pinnacle dominated the PC video-editing market. But, after its initial success with the DV500, the advent of sophisticated realtime editing seemed to leave the company behind. While it was a good product, the company’s Pro-ONE arrived when competitive products from Matrox and Canopus had been available for some time. The Pinnacle Edition PRO 5 is an entirely different matter.