In the last couple of years, Canon has held back from new camcorder formats. This HG10 is its first stab at a high-definition hard disk-based product, while competitors are already on their second or third generations.

But that hasn’t prevented it from producing some splendid products: Canon’s A-Listed HV20 is currently the best sub-$1500 HDV camcorder on the market.

The HG10 certainly has its work cut out, but a quick glance at the HG10’s specifications shows immediate promise. It has the same 1/2.7in CMOS with 2.96 megapixels as the HV20, the same lens, and matching optical image stabilisation. Instead of tape, of course, it has a 40GB hard disk and it records to AVCHD instead of HDV, which allows yout to store around 5.75 hours of video and the top quality, 15Mb/s setting.

The AVCHD format hasn’t won us over in the past. Although the MPEG4 AVC/H.264 compression it uses is more efficient than HDV, the quality isn’t quite comparable. As a result, the HG10’s quality isn’t quite up there with the HV20, with more motion artefacts. Colour fidelity is just as good, though and in lower light, the slight smoothing of detail reduces the visibility of grain.

It’s not full HD either. Despite the fact that the chip picks up 1920 x 1080, video is still recorded at 1440 x 1080. The top still image resolution is 2048 x 1536, with a miniSD slot for storage. But the quality is still very good – the best we’ve seen so far from AVCHD in fact. And The HG10 does also offers plenty of top end features too, including a standard accessory shoe hidden mic mini-jack and headphone output. There’s even a progressive shooting mode available, but we found it made the video look too jerky.

If you’re serious about your video, the HV20 remains the recommended choice. But if you want the convenience of a hard disk, reasonable three megapixel stills, and high-definition recording all-in-one package, Canon has another winner on its hands.