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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

HD camcorders enter the mainstream once and for all. With image quality like this, there’s little reason to spend more.

A good price coupled with outstanding image quality – a good budget alternative to the Panasonic HDC-HS9

Impressive optical quality and storage space, though a touch expensive

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.

Canon grabs the crown for the most fully featured HDV camcorder for under $1500

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

A new interface, smart albums, guided editing and photo merging keep Photoshop Elements ahead of the pack

High resolution stills and laudable quality for the money, but image stabilisation isn’t the best

The smallest, cheapest camera on test, but unsurprisingly, it also has the poorest image quality

AVCHD support and some useful new effects keep this as the leading entry-level video editor.

Support for latest video formats and a batch-media encoder, but supporting apps have seen little upgrading.

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

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