We can safely say that flash is definitely the most worthwhile form of data storage since the humble Mini-DV tape was announced some years ago. In between that time, both DVDs and conventional hard drives have tried to secure a footing in the consumer marketplace as the storage of choice, but both have proven ultimately problematic - each format is not the best storage option in portable, shaky devices like video cameras. There are no guarantees that your precious memories will be safely stored when using drives with moving physical parts.

Flash is worth getting excited about, because of its portable versatility. This flash based unit doesn’t contain any moving parts, so it’s much less likely to break down like a physical hard drive and it features much faster access to video data. Thanks to the flash memory, it was really fast to start up (0.8 seconds) and we found it quicker than conventional hard drive cameras to search the scenes we had filmed on earlier in the day.
The camera is not much larger than the size of your hand and is light enough to walk around with for long periods - we spent over an hour holding it in one session. The optical stabilisation coped well with eliminating some of the shake in our panning and walking shots. The results compared well with some stable tripod shots we took.

The payoff with HD is in big screen viewing. We previewed some of our footage on a 42-inch plasma and the results were impressive, showing richness and detail of colour. We were impressed by the level of detail in the shots, a big step up from Mini-DV recordings presented on old format CRT TV’s.

The HF10 is a dual storage based flash camera, which gives you the handy option of adding an SD card if you find the 16GB isn’t big enough. You can grab 1GB at most retailers for less than $25 and even cheaper if you hunt around, though we don’t recommend setting off with 1GB, because that equates to around 8 minutes of storage space at the highest quality HD video setting. You’ll need to invest in a 4 - 8GB to get anywhere near an hour of footage.

In Canon’s favour, they have provided everything that you’re going to need to get started – right out of the box. Basic video editing software is supplied, along with the 16GB of onboard memory which provides around 2 and half hours of quality at the highest possible settings, (1920 x 1080 HD mode) and should be adequate for most family movies.

The flipside to using portable flash cards is that it encourages mum and dad movie-makers to back up their precious memories to their computer on a regular basis, due to the smaller file/recording limit of the current cards. That’s probably what convinced Panasonic to release their flash based HDC-SD1, which doesn’t provide any form of on board flash storage drive (only removable flash), and maybe a sign of things to come in the flash camera market.

The menu on the HF10 feels intuitive and it's easy to find the setting you’re looking for, though manual features are hard to get at, which might annoy manual focus fans. The results that we viewed using the auto settings were quite good in capturing vivid, true to life colour tones, and most of the pictures we filmed produced an acceptable and attractive image for an auto setting. In areas of bright sunlight, the image was prone to a pastel style contrast, but this is to be expected in overly saturated, brightly lit shots. The camera handled dimly lit areas with a decent amount of tolerance and the results looked acceptable to us. The camera LED light worked surprisingly well in low lighting conditions.

The 12x optical zoom is adequate and standard for cameras of this class. The digital zoom can go as high as 200x, but we don’t advise using that unless you want disjointed blurry pictures. The camera ships with a Canon ‘intelligent battery’ that can last as long as 90 minutes, but in practice runs about 55 minutes, which means you’ll need to pack a spare battery for those important occasions.

The camera uses a CMOS chip (as opposed to a CCD chip) and we found it served the purpose as a reliable automatic home camcorder quite well. The HF10 should be a hit with movie makers and travellers looking for good quality pictures without the moving parts of conventional camera drives or tapes.